With evolving work-from-home fashion trends and the great eCommerce acceleration, athleisure retailers have been busier than usual over the past eighteen months. As a membership-based, digitally-native company, Fabletics and their skilled team have a lot to show as leaders in the athleisure, subscription market. On this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext, my co-host, Veronika Sonsev, and I sit down with Fabletics COO, Meera Bhatia, to talk about the past, present and future of Fabletics and her career.
Welcome to the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast, I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with CommerceNext and presented by Wunderkind.
With evolving work-from-home fashion trends and the great eCommerce acceleration, athleisure retailers have been busier than usual over the past eighteen months. As a membership-based, digitally-native company, Fabletics and their skilled team have a lot to show as leaders in the athleisure, subscription market.
On this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext, my co-host, Veronika Sonsev, and I sit down with Fabletics COO, Meera Bhatia, to talk about the past, present and future of Fabletics and her career.
Together, we dive into Fabletics’ origin story, post-pandemic strategy and their evolving membership model. Meera reflects on her product-solution-focused background, gender representation in the boardroom and the core values that Fabletics looks for when hiring at any level.
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext. Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast platform where we’ll be sharing career advice and marketing strategies from eCommerce and digital marketing leaders at retailers and direct-to-consumer brands each and every episode. CommerceNext is a community, event series and conference for marketers at retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Through our online forums, interviews, webinars, summits and other in-person events, we harness the collective wisdom of our community to help marketers grow their businesses and advance their careers. Join CommerceNext events to meet other industry leaders and learn the latest ecommerce and marketing strategies. You can find upcoming events at CommerceNext.com
Have a fantastic week everyone!
ABOUT US:
Scott Silverman
An ecommerce veteran, Scott Silverman has been active in the industry since 1999 and is passionate about digital retail and the innovation driving the industry. Scott Silverman is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. Previously, he spent 10 years as Executive Director of Shop.org where he launched the Shop.org Annual Summit. Scott co-invented “Cyber Monday” in 2005 and was the founder of Cybermonday.com in 2006, a shopping site that has generated more than $2.5 million for Shop.org’s scholarship fund.
Veronika Sonsev
Veronika Sonsev is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. She also leads the retail practice for Chameleon Collective and is a contributor for Forbes on how to grow retail and ecommerce in the age of Amazon. Having spent the last 10+ years working with some of the largest retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, Veronika has intimate knowledge of the challenges facing retail and ecommerce today. She is also an advocate for women in business and founded the global non-profit mBolden, which is now part of SheRunsit.
Michael LeBlanc is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada’s top retail industry podcast, The Voice of Retail, plus Global E-Commerce Tech Talks and The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois. You can learn more about Michael here or on LinkedIn.
About CommerceNext
CommerceNext is a community, event series and conference for marketers at retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Through our online forums, interviews, webinars, summits and other in-person events, we harness the collective wisdom of our community to help marketers grow their businesses and advance their careers. Join CommerceNext events to meet other industry leaders and learn the latest ecommerce and marketing strategies. You can find upcoming events at https://commercenext.com/commercenext-webinars/.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Meera, membership, brand, business, pandemic, company, members, role, stores, women, evolve, retail, customer, experience, launched, career, hire, conversations, celebrity, talk
SPEAKERS
Veronika Sonsev, Michael LeBlanc, Meera Bhatia
Michael LeBlanc 00:04
Welcome to the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast. I'm your host Michael Leblanc and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with CommerceNext and presented by Wunderkind.
Michael LeBlanc 00:12
With evolving work-from-home fashion trends and the great eCommerce acceleration, athleisure retailers have been busier than usual over the past eighteen months. As a membership-based, digitally native company, Fabletics and their skilled team have a lot to show as leaders in the athleisure, subscription market.
Michael LeBlanc 00:29
On this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext, my co-host, Veronika Sonsev, and I sit down with Fabletics COO, Meera Bhatia, to talk about the past, present and future of Fabletics and her career.
Michael LeBlanc 00:40
Together, we dive into Fabletics’ origin story, post-pandemic strategy and their evolving membership model. Meera reflects on her product-solution-focused background, gender representation in the boardroom and the core values that Fabletics looks for when hiring at any level.
Meera Bhatia 00:57
The membership experience effectively allows us to deliver a much highly personalized experience. So, because our members share their style and size preferences, and they're visiting us monthly, we learn a lot about them.
Michael LeBlanc 01:13
Let's listen in now.
Veronika Sonsev 01:15
Welcome to Conversations with CommerceNext. Meera, thank you so much for joining us today.
Meera Bhatia 01:20
Thanks so much for having me.
Veronika Sonsev 01:21
I am joined here with the producer and co-host of Conversations with CommerceNext, Michael LeBlanc.
Michael LeBlanc 01:27
Hi Meera, how are you?
Meera Bhatia 01:29
Good. How are you, Michael?
Michael LeBlanc 01:30
I am good in the great white north up here in Toronto. Where are we speaking to you, where abouts are you?
Meera Bhatia 01:36
In the sunny southern, south of Los Angeles.
Michael LeBlanc 01:41
Nice.
Veronika Sonsev 01:42
That's amazing. It's been sunny here in New Jersey as well. We've had, like, unseasonably summer-like weather in the fall. It's crazy. So Meera, I want to start briefly by telling the audience about your background. You started your career in product management at companies like Microsoft and hotels.com and LinkedIn before moving into operations at Stella & Dot, and now Fabletics. So how did your career evolve? And how does your product management background frame the way that you approach your current role?
Meera Bhatia 02:13
Yeah, so as you mentioned, I started my career in product management, I was an engineer and an undergrad, I went into product management after I got my MBA, and primarily first had high tech companies brought started broadened into operations at Stella & Dot, I think that between the engineering and kind of product management focus, you know, I was always very focused on customer, customer problems. That's what product management is, and in a technology company, and I feel like that, you know, broadening the scope into more operations is just, sort of, expanding that focus on customer problems. And so that felt very natural to me, and also sort of the data focus and thinking about how to innovate and use data and think about how to tackle problems differently. You know, just to kind of across a broader scope of functional areas. So, I, you know, I started off in product management, I initially took on engineering, analytics, and then eventually expanded into customer service operations warehouse.
Veronika Sonsev 03:16
Awesome. So, it's almost like that problem solving experience from product management to translate more broadly into all of these different functions and in, in the business.
Meera Bhatia 03:27
Yeah. And I think also just customer focus, like I said, I mean, I think product management, you always need to be focused on like, what is the customer problem that you're trying to solve? And I feel like that customer focus and all functions like operations sometimes can feel maybe like its back end. But in my view, it's really, you know, if you're thinking fundamentally around, how are you delivering a delightful customer experience and are you always keeping that end customer in mind, like that's how you're going to really innovate and accel?
Veronika Sonsev 03:53
And let's talk about Fabletics for a moment. The company was co-founded with Kate Hudson and is a leader in the athleisure space. Tell us a little bit about the company and its journey so far, and how has that business evolved over the years and including the relationship with Kate Hudson,
Meera Bhatia 04:10
You know, our co-founders, Adam Goldberg and Don Ressler back in 2011, had a vision to launch into the activewear space and develop a brand that was new and fun and female oriented, and they were, they had mutual friends with Kate and their idea for this brand tied very closely with what Kate believed in. And that's what resulted in this incredible company of Fabletics. Adam and Don had another company also at the time called JustFab and together, they began this model of direct-to-consumer, membership based, membership-based businesses. Very innovation, vertically, integrated technology focused and, kind of, grew that into the textile fashion group, portfolio company, which eventually had five brands underneath it and has now, you know, has grown enormously over the last many years and obviously Fabletics has had amazing growth as well.
Meera Bhatia 05:08
Over the many, last several years, we, you know, we've gone, undergone significant corporate restructuring as a result of that success and TFG, the brand incubator has, now has three separate companies. So, Fabletics, our global fashion brands, which includes that original brand of JustFab, Shoedazzle, and then FabKids, and then our Savage X Fenty brand.
So, Fabletics, you know, obviously, is the one we're here to talk about today, but Fabletics has, you know, grown over the years. And Kate is a co-founder, and her perspective continues to be an inspiration for us. But you know, we have a number of celeb, other celebrity partners, and we regularly launch new collaborations with them and feature them in our campaigns. And you know, we have a big focus on influencer marketing in general. And we think that's much broader than just mega celebrities. So we see the value in micro and nano influencers, and also the mega celebrities, and we kind of work across the full spectrum.
Michael LeBlanc 06:04
You know, the, the genesis of the organization is from a celebrity herself, right. I guess, the, the OG of influencers. Does, does she play a greater or lesser role from that perspective, just that influencer perspective, how do you weave that into the, into the execution of the marketing plan, and just the, the essence of the, of the brand itself?
Meera Bhatia 06:25
She's always played a role in the direction of the brand, and she certainly still does. But you know, she has a number of other ventures. And we have another number of other influencers who are a part of the brand today?
Michael LeBlanc 06:35
Well, let's talk a little bit more about fabric. So, it's a membership model. But is there an increasing focus or thoughts around a store component? Talk about that for a little bit? Yeah, so
Meera Bhatia 06:45
We do have, you know, we began as an online business, we are fundamentally a membership model, our store business complements that. So, we have launched, you know, we have a retail business, we have 71 stores today and we view those as a way to expose more people to our brand and bring them into the stores. But we do have people, you know, people can come in and sign up into our membership program through our stores as well. You know, and it is a funnel for that membership program.
Meera Bhatia 07:17
So, it's not, instead of, you know, away from the trial, our brand and get, and get exposed to the brand. So, we believe you are very much complimentary, and it's part of our omni channel approach to business. So, you become a member through a store, you can take that shopping experience online, it's very integrated as a result of our sort of, you know, of our data focus in our integrated technology. We know what you've bought in the store, we can bring that into your online experience as well. So, it's one holistic membership.
Michael LeBlanc 07:51
All right, so we're not talking a wholesale relationship here. We're talking about Fabletics branded stores, right, so.
Meera Bhatia 07:56
Yep. Fabletics branded, Fabletics, very much in the Fabletics ethos is powered by Fabletics, we, um, you know, we run it with our own technology. So, it's very much, you can feel it's, it's built with the same, kind of, focus on innovation differentiated experience, that, you know, all of our consumer touch points are.
Michael LeBlanc 08:17
And it sounds like it's, it has a multi, you know, multi-faceted purpose, it's both acquisition, but it's also membership management, right. So, members can do some admin stuff around their membership in a physical place. So, how, so these 70 Plus stores, are they spread out across the US and talk about that a little bit?
Meera Bhatia 08:34
Yeah, so, we, we just launched our first store in Europe and Berlin. We're very excited for that 71st store. That just was, I think, just a week ago, I'm in a little bit of a blur of timing here, but, yeah, so primarily, the US, spread out across the US. Yeah, and I think, yeah, we think of ourselves as very much omni channel. Is that, you know, it's not just that we were online, and then we added on stores, you know, we bring in stores as part of the omni channel experience. So, and we, we've, we've believed strongly in the physical retail experience.
Meera Bhatia 09:09
So, you know, we've made it however many minutes into this all right, and we haven't mentioned the pandemic, which is amazing, but we're despite the pandemic impact on physical retail, like we doubled down on physical retail and, and believed you know, that it would expand, and we've increased our investment in that space, too. So, um, you know, we Fabletics was kind of created in this space where technology meets fashion, and we brought that idea into our physical stores as well. So as you mentioned, you know, members can come in, we'll recognize them as a member, they can access their member benefits. And we'll integrate what they did in the fitting room, what they try it on into their online member experience as well.
Michael LeBlanc 09:52
So you know, I love the idea of this integration of the stores and your core technology and let's talk about membership, the membership model I had Recently the opportunity to interview Robbie Kellman Baxter, who's, kind of, this, a bit of a, you know, her focus is on membership.
Meera Bhatia 10:07
Yeah. She's a subscription guru, I know her name, yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 10:10
Yeah and what I came to appreciate, because we talked about, listen, subscriptions, in some ways are nothing new, right, I mean, if we think back to, you know, Columbia House and getting records, but they've come to a new level, and I see that in your business, right, it's not just a transactional relationship, the membership has a much more deeper relationship, and shapes, the experiences that your shoppers come to expect. And that and that creates this great cohesion. Could you talk about that a little bit, about how membership inherently shapes the customer experience?
Meera Bhatia 10:42
Yeah, I mean, I think the membership experience effectively allows us to deliver a much highly personalized experience. So because our members share their style and size preferences, and they're visiting us monthly, like we learn a lot about them, that means we can tailor what we show them when they come to this site, it means we can be highly predictive in what they're going to want from an inventory management perspective, right, so we can eliminate a lot of efficiency, in even just how we buy and design and that reduces our overhead, all of that, sort of, overhead cost reduction that gets that value gets passed back to the member eventually.
Meera Bhatia 11:27
So, so, we think of it as really like a win-win, right. We, we are learning about our customers and building our VIPs and building a relationship with them. And they are getting better, more personalized products that they want, as we learn more about them. So that membership model really just increases the personalization, it lowers our return rates, right, so it, it, it drives efficiency in the entire model that gets passed back to value as value to them.
Michael LeBlanc 12:01
And it feels like it creates a brand cohesion, right, I'm a shopper versus I'm a member and I think it looks like you take real advantage of that as in, you really get that as part of your DNA, right. You've got members, not shoppers, and I think it orients, I think, businesses a little differently in how they see their customers, yeah?
Meera Bhatia 12:19
Yeah, we, I mean, and that's exactly right. We do talk about them as our members, not our, on our shoppers, right, we build a relationship with them, and we acquire them once and then we have a built-in way to continue to talk to them. Right. And that's, I think that's, that's an advantage of our business. And that's something that we, I think allows us to different differentiate the way that we operate and the way that you know, we think and even just the way we storytelling, we operate internally, right, like we're constantly thinking about the members and reading our end, they're very member first and how we're approaching our business.
Michael LeBlanc 12:59
Yeah, even, it even affects the language inside, inside the four walls, right.
Meera Bhatia 13:03
Yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 13:04
So, we didn't and haven't talked about the COVID area yet, but of course, it's coming and in the conversation. So, it's here. And you know, listen, retail ecommerce had to evolve a lot, or at least you know, survive whether it was, you know, the sledgehammer of business, or the shockwave of just sudden great increases of volumes. Now you are in a category that probably had a huge tailwind in terms of, you know, Apple athleisure and work at home lifestyle, how did your business change during the pandemic? What did you need to do other than probably buy a few more servers or a little more space in the cloud? I suppose. Just talk about that for a bit.
Meera Bhatia 13:40
What a ride it's been, right, so, you know, I think obviously, our omni channel strategy was a benefit for us in the sense that, you know, we did have to close down the stores and but our, but our online business obviously thrived and grew and during that time, the pandemic saw a rapid change in kind of in the consumer behavior around what they wanted to be wearing every single day. And that meant that people increasingly wanted to be comfortable and, you know, we spent the last many months listening to what consumers wanted and, you know, watching this, sort of, shift to more flexible, comfortable liv-, comfortable living throughout the pandemic, and, and we really believe that that's here to stay.
Meera Bhatia 14:29
And that was the inspiration for our new lounge collection, for example that we've just launched. We're really excited about it. We've also watched, you know, the trend around working out from home through the pandemic and that was the inspiration for why we launched our Fabletics Fit app, which allows our members to have free access to on demand workouts through an app that they get through their membership. We launched a partnership with Hydrow, that, meaning you can try out our Hydrow machine in most of our robotics, retail stores, but we have a deal with them as well for connected fitness. So, there's a lot of, sort of, like, micro trends that, kind of, emerged through the pandemic. Yeah, that we listened to. And we're a company that moves pretty quickly. So, we were able to maximize on some of those pretty fast, which was great.
Veronika Sonsev 15:20
Well, shifting gears a little bit Meera, I noticed that both of us are members of chief, you also work at a company that has a lot of amazing women at the helm and, you know, it seems that the retail industry doesn't have a shortage of women in the ranks, but at the same time, there's much fewer women in the C suite. Why do you think that's the case and what can we do to change that in our industry?
Meera Bhatia 15:46
Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, as, as an industry, there's not a shortage of women. I also come from a background in technology where there was a shortage of women, right. So, it is actually refreshing to work in a different, in a different context, you know, Fabletics has a workforce that over 70%, identify as women, and RSVP and above level, were 50% identify as women, which I think, you know, bucks a little bit of that trend, even if what you're talking about with the with the C suite level, which is one of the things I love about the company.
Meera Bhatia 16:22
Yeah, I think we're really, really, just really a value driven company and do the right thing and are very inclusive. I don't know entirely about why this is the case, other than I think all of the economic environmental reasons for why women drop out of the workforce exist in retail as well, good, need to take care of families extract, you know, the fact that and this is, you know, these are broad, generic statements that are not true for everyone, but, you know, when women are often the ones that are their primary caregivers, so they feel that they can't balance work, that the sport models, aren't there, like those are all true, you know, in these companies and so.
Meera Bhatia 17:06
So, I think that they just find that it's hard to balance, right, and we need to have more support for women who want to do both. And so, I think that's probably contributing to this dynamic. And, you know, I think that there's also been lack of role models and leaders and I think for myself, you know, I've benefited from mentorship over the years, not, not always from women, but that's something that I think can help change the dynamics as well and so that's something that I take seriously for myself, that I try to, I'm actively mentoring for five women within my company. I'm, you know, I do that externally as well. So, I think that's something that, that I feel like I need to be doing to get back and, you know, try to, try to just change it one person at a time. That's all, all we can do, I guess.
Michael LeBlanc 18:00
If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure and hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform, so you don't miss another great episode. We'll be right back with our interview with Meera Bhatia, from Fabletics, right after this important message.
Michael LeBlanc 18:13
Wunderkind is a leading performance marketing engine that delivers tailored experiences at scale. Digital businesses use Wunderkind to remember who users are better than ever before, allowing them to deliver high-performing one-to-one messages on websites, through emails and texts, and in ads at a scale that's not otherwise possible. Wunderkind drives $1.2 billion annually in directly attributable revenue for top e-commerce brands like Uniqlo, Sonos, and HelloFresh, often ranking as a top-three revenue channel in their own analytics, learn more at wunderkind.co, that's wunderkind.co
Veronika Sonsev 18:51
That's so great and organizations like Chief are also designed to help with some of that by kind of supplementing what
Meera Bhatia 18:58
Chief was amazing. I mean, I joined Chief when I moved to Los Angeles, and it's been an amazing way to get to know a network of, of, you know, very senior level women and have open conversations, I think that's, that's something that also very, is very helpful to have to have conversations and a network of people that you can talk to about the things that you're facing and realize, especially through this last 18 months, where it's been very isolating, you know, and short and, and you can often think like, oh my gosh, am I the only person that feels this way and then you get on a call with 12, 10, 12 people who are in similar, you know, levels as you with similarly high powered jobs and who are all and you realize, like, oh, no, this is not just me going crazy, and you can talk through it. It's been a, it's been a fantastic outlet for that.
Veronika Sonsev 19:47
Yeah, absolutely. So, it sounds like to some extent, the answers are kind of having the right networks when you can share your experiences laterally with other senior women, but then also just finding the time to mentor rising star and an up and coming women leaders just so that we have more that are ready for those senior roles, which is great advice. So shifting gears again, a little bit now to your career, if you were to imagine your role in five years, how, if at all, do you think it would be different than it was today and I'm going to say, there's another way to kind of look at this question, which is, if you were to think about where the industry will evolve, how will leadership need to adapt, so, kind of, thinking about your role in that context?
Meera Bhatia 20:32
If only I had a crystal ball, about what five years from now will look like. The one thing I can say, so you know, I don't know what will, what will, I have no idea what my role will involve in five years, but what I can for sure predict is that customer expectations around experience and service are going to continue to evolve in a very, very rapid pace and we're gonna have to continue to evolve to keep up with those. I feel thankful to be at a company like Fabletics, it has that sort of DNA of innovation and speed and listening to our members, and confident that we'll be able to continue to stay ahead of that, and, you know, continue to innovate, to meet those customer needs, but I think expectations are just going to keep rising. And we are going to continue to have to be where, where our customers are in the format that they want to be in the you know, in the experiences they want to be, and it's going to be more and more than just a transaction.
Michael LeBlanc 21:38
Yeah, it's funny, when we were coming up with this, kind of, style of question, we you know, sometimes we don't know what's going to be like in five months, let alone five years, so it kind of gets, expands our mind and oh, my goodness, think five years back and what that was like.
Meera Bhatia 21:50
Yeah, like I don't think I could have told you I'd be where I am where I am right now. I mean, I, certainly, five years back, I could absolutely not have imagined that I would have been sitting in my house working from home for almost two years. You know, and then we would have had this, sort of, overnight growth in ecommerce and all of these things that had happened. So I don't even want to predict, but like I said, I think, well, we will go where the customer leads us and it will happen quickly.
Michael LeBlanc 22:18
Yeah, fantastic response. Now, you're a growing company. Let's get back to the current, current state, our current, current times when you hire, when you look to hire, what do you look for, how important is, is education, how important is experience, how important is experience in retail or, you know, membership-based retail and what's a successful hire. So, give me, give me a sense of what you look for, and, and how that how that rolls around in Fabletics?
Meera Bhatia 22:45
Yeah, I mean, we hire across such a diversity of different kinds of roles. So, there's not one answer to that, right. I mean, I think that we have roles in our retail stores, we have a roles in our distribution centers, we have roles in our corporate headquarters, we look so what experience or education we might look for in one role, like, you know, would be cooked there, there are opportunities for everybody with Fabletics and we value diversity and a multitude of opinions and backgrounds and that's, you know, very important to us. What, what is consistent is, what our core valu-, like our core values and philosophies are, and that is innovation, drive, and one team and that, that's what we vet all of our talent against, regardless of experience, education, or any, anything like that. So, those are the three things that, you know, that are that are common across all of the functions that we would hire against everything else, you know, depend on the role.
Michael LeBlanc 23:50
Yeah, right on. So, although those are the three, kind of, foundational elements to any role, whether you're serving the customer in a physical store, or whether you're part of your team, right, so there's one of the principles. Well, it's an interesting time to hire people. If we had the great acceleration, we've had the great, whatever we've had in terms of trying to find people, do you have any open jobs this, kind of, opportunity, we got a great audience.
Meera Bhatia 24:12
I do, and I've got to say that Fabletics is a great place to work. I mentioned, you know, obviously, we have our sister brands as well. We have Textile LS, which is the shared operations that, you know, that I lead, that actually work with all of our sister brands, as well, our sister companies, and we are hiring across all of those areas. So, there's something for everyone out there and if you're interested in learning more about them, you know, I'd suggest you can check out the job listings. There's a link in the bottom of our Fabletics website. You can read a little bit more about us on our LinkedIn pages. But we have a lot of openings, and we would love to get, you know, we, like I said we love to grow our team and bring new people to the table and you know, we really value, value the diversity of opinions that, you know, that we can, that we can add.
Michael LeBlanc 25:06
Well, and you, and you bring, with any opportunity, anyone who's considering you bring this diversity of roles and businesses and flexibility, right. So that's, that's a real advantage, I think, a real plus for your business, you can, you can start in one place and end up in a different business.
Meera Bhatia 25:20
That's very true. There's endless opportunity to start in a retail store and you know, grow your career in any direction you want.
Veronika Sonsev 25:30
Very cool and with such a tech forward company, I'm sure you'll get a lot of interest in, in those opportunities. Well, Meera, you know, thank you so much for joining us today. It was wonderful to learn about your career journey and about Fabletics.
Meera Bhatia 25:43
Thank you very much. Thanks for your time today.
Michael LeBlanc 25:46
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext.Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast platform where we’ll be sharing career advice and marketing strategies from eCommerce and digital marketing leaders at retailers and direct-to-consumer brands each and every episode. CommerceNext is a community, event series and conference for marketers at retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Through our online forums, interviews, webinars, summits and other in-person events, we harness the collective wisdom of our community to help marketers grow their businesses and advance their careers. Join CommerceNext events to meet other industry leaders and learn the latest e-commerce and marketing strategies. You can find upcoming events at CommerceNext.com