On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Kiran Smith. Kiran Smith is the CMO at ButcherBox, a direct-to-consumer brand delivering high-quality, humanely raised meat and sustainably sourced seafood to consumers across the U.S. We talk about nurturing genuine influencer relationships, the multi-faceted role of a CMO, thriving in a test and learn environment, and so much more!
As Chief Marketing Officer, Kiran oversees marketing, brand, channel and product strategy along with creative services with a goal of expanding ButcherBox's reach and communicating its authenticity to consumers.
Prior to ButcherBox, Kiran served as the CMO at iRobot and as the CEO of Arnold Worldwide. Kiran earned her B.A. in Computer Science from Bucknell University and an MBA from The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Kiran Smith
I would say one of the biggest learning opportunities I had in my career is when you make a switch, you're not starting off at zero.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today I'm welcoming to the show an amazing woman.
She is the CMO of ButcherBox, Kiran Smith. Welcome to the show.
Kiran Smith
Thank you for having me.
Chase Clymer
Awesome.
So for the 3 people in the audience that have been living under a rock that listen to this podcast, they obviously enjoy CPG, they enjoy direct-to-consumer, what is ButcherBox if I am unaware?
Kiran Smith
ButcherBox is a half a billion dollar company. 8 years old, we deliver high quality meat, beef, seafood, chicken, turkey directly to your home. And we make basically getting your meat even easier than it's ever been before.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. That's amazing.
I'm excited to get into the weeds on what you guys are up to now.
But let's talk about your journey first. You started at ButcherBox in early 2022, if I do believe.
What were you doing before that? How did you land such an awesome role?
Kiran Smith
I am probably the unlikeliest of marketers, given the roles that I've had in the past. I started post-business school and spent 10 years in the grocery world, and that was my love of food and the foundation and data and the power that data has.
And from there, after being at Shaw's, SuperValue, Albertsons, Sainsbury, I moved over to the very logical world of kids shoes on StrideRite. And from there, really, I was always public facing consumer packaged goods, including Brookstone, iRobot most recently. I headed up Arnold on the agency side for a couple of years and then found myself at ButcherBox in 2022.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. So coming in as a CMO at such a large company, typically, I'm talking to founders that are doing tens of millions of dollars a year. You guys are doing well above that. And what you're responsible for is a world of difference than what those people are dealing with.
So can you talk about what the CMO role at an enterprise-level ecommerce company consists of?
Kiran Smith
Well, this role didn't exist until I came into the company last year. Prior to that, it was very much still in startup mode, where you had different functions happening across the company.
And my role was created to consolidate many of those functions. So what it entails right now is the brand and strategy work, product marketing, creative services, and it also includes retention team, the growth team, analytics team, and public relations.
So having multiple functions that live in different places under one roof now really allows us to start thinking much more in an integrated way of how we're showing up in the market. And both whether it's in front of our consumers, whether it's in front of our partners.
And that consolidation, I think, has really helped us tell our story better about why ButcherBox and why people love us so much.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
You mentioned startup mode. And it's, go fast, stuff breaks, we'll figure it out. So you're coming in and consolidating a lot of that stuff. Can you talk to me a bit about how that marketing strategy has evolved since you've joined the company?
Kiran Smith
I would say the biggest part about it is planning, it’s where it's evolved the most. Now you don't have individual teams who are all operating under their own plans towards their own specific goals. With the integrated plan, what that allows you to do is really start making some choices in terms of where do we want to focus? How do we want to talk about the story? How are we measuring it in terms of success?
And I would also say part of the way that it's helped us a lot was as we even think about where we're putting our dollars, how those dollars are performing for us, it allows us to do it in a way that has a bigger impact in the long term.
Chase Clymer
In the long term.
I would say for a younger, scrappier team, they're looking 90 days down the line, maybe 6 months. Are you guys setting those goalposts a little bit further?
Kiran Smith
We are. Especially as we continue to grow in size and scale, awareness becomes even more important as part of our marketing mix.
In startup mode, you're very much looking at this week, maybe this month. Versus as the company starts to grow, the size of the pie has to grow, and that means starting to look at more longer-term investments of how you're getting your message there, getting people to want to learn a little bit more about your brand, and then bringing them along the marketing cycle in terms of all the way down to signing them up and then keeping them as part of our family.
Chase Clymer
I think when you're a younger brand, it's a lot more direct response. You need to make your money back a lot quicker.
But it's interesting to hear that you guys are allocating and planning for some of that long tail and just awareness plays that you're not going to necessarily see that response in a timeline that I guess, a younger brand couldn't afford.
Kiran Smith
That's exactly right. The role that experiential plays for us, brand awareness building, the role that public relations plays for us, referrals, all of those are longer term plays that just require a different playbook than maybe what we were typically showing up with.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. So you mentioned that you've got a lot of integral parts of the marketing under your umbrella.
Now, are you in the day-to-day doing all these things or are you hiring key players to empower that and report to you?
Kiran Smith
The most important thing when I first joined ButcherBox was to learn about how ButcherBox operated. It's a subscription business, all dotcom, and that world is different from a typical retail organization.
So for me, when I first joined, it was really important to be able to roll up my sleeves and make sure that I started understanding how the business worked, how the teams worked, and what the processes were. As we've grown over time, we've made people-decisions in terms of how we're organized ourselves, the leaders that we have in place in doing that work and then how we start to work better together as a team.
It's been an evolution, but I'd say we're probably in about the halfway point of it.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome.
So you have a big piece of the marketing strategy that lends itself to affiliate marketing. How does that work for you guys? Can you take a little bit behind the curtain and let us know a little bit of your marketing strategy there?
Kiran Smith
It's one of my favorite parts about the butcher box history–the fact that when Mike Salguero started it eight years ago, affiliate marketing was a massive part of our marketing budget. At the time, if you go back and think eight years ago and you look at what people were looking at, they were looking for options to find humanely raised beef products, meat products, and it wasn't readily available. As you had paleo, keto, whole30.
There are a lot of influencers in that space. We're talking about what it meant to be part of the program and the type of foods you should be looking for. There weren't a lot of people providing that.
And what we found is by partnering with some of these affiliates, influencers, it allowed us to be able to get our brand out there, have them talk about why it was a great option for the people who they were talking to and it really helped us build out the business pretty quickly.
The other advantage of it is by the way that we set up the relationships with them. If we benefited, they benefited. If they referred us and someone signed up, they continued to get the benefit of having those signups as those customers continued to get ButcherBox, which was a really great way to grow the business and feel like everyone was growing in the same direction and have the same incentives.
Chase Clymer
Now would it be correct to say that affiliate was probably like the number one channel for a while there that you were using for new customer acquisition?
Kiran Smith
It absolutely was.
Chase Clymer
What would you say to a young entrepreneur about focusing on your customer acquisition and why they shouldn't try a million things at once?
Kiran Smith
I think for ButcherBox, as it was getting its story out there about why it was a special business that people wanted to get to know better, I'd say the organic part of the affiliate relationship was that we weren't trying to be everything to everybody. We wanted the affiliates to be true to their story, how they wanted to talk to their audiences, and we wanted to be a good fit for them.
What that meant is that we didn't try to script them. We didn't try to tell them, you need to say this, you need to focus on this. We wanted them to use their own words, and we wanted them to love the product as well.
So we wanted to make sure that they were really understanding about the taste, the quality, the story behind the farmers and the animals, all of those things were really important in building that out.
It's hard to do that if you're doing a million other things as well. So by nurturing the affiliate program, really getting the right team in place, getting them creating personal relationships with our affiliates and influencers, that took time, that took people, and it took focus.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I think that one of the things that I interact with all the time with merchants and clients and whatnot is they always want to try new things, and the more obvious lever to pull is double down on this thing that's obviously working. You don't want to distract and it's very rare that you're actually maxing out any of these channels.
Kiran Smith
I agree.
And I think what was great about how ButcherBox built out the affiliate program is it wasn't just about the words that the affiliates were using in terms of, as I'm talking about ButcherBox. It was about the recipes that they provide, how they were integrating ButcherBox into their lifestyles.
All of those pieces gave us a much more holistic way of talking about the brand and the partnerships.
I think by working with affiliates closely, getting to know them, getting to know their audiences, we were able to customize much more of what we were able to offer them as part of that partnership and what they gave back to us.
But it definitely felt much more like a partnership than it did a business relationship.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
Now, what were some of the key learnings that you took away from your prior experience in robots and children's shoes, helping run an ad agency that you brought in and helped you within the first year of being a CMO at ButcherBox?
Kiran Smith
I would say one of the biggest learning opportunities I had in my career is when you make a switch, you're not starting off at zero. That was probably when I switched from 10 years in grocery and then going to kids shoes.
What did I know about kids shoes except that I had three daughters who wore them? That was about the extent of my experience.
And yet when I showed up at Strideway and when I got into the business, I realized I did bring a lot to the table. I'd worked in loyalty programs. I'd done direct mail. I'd done a lot of the pieces that the business was working on. And it was that last 20, 30% that I needed to learn.
And that was exciting. It was fun to learn. And with every subsequent role that I've taken thus far, the same is applied. I bring a lot to the table from my past experiences and getting to know that last 20, 30% is where the nuances start.
And so the same thing applied with ButcherBox. Consumer goods are fun. When you're excited about talking about your product, when you're excited about telling someone why they should try it out because of what it offers, that's a great job to be in. And if you feel like you have that passion for the good that you are selling, that's the bulk of the job.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
How much are you allowed to share with me about the decision to move off of a custom homegrown solution to Shopify?
Kiran Smith
It was a decision that the team, they did their due diligence in terms of, we had been on WordPress in the beginning, again, homegrown system. It got us to where we've been today, which is amazing.
But as we start to look at that next level of growth to get to a billion dollar company, what we've found is that we really need to look around and say, “Do we have the right platform on which we can grow?”
When you start off as a startup, how you build that foundation is different from how you would if you're an established company that's looking for that next level.
When we chose Shopify, basically, they were a great partner in terms of showing us the vision on how they could support us. And a lot of the ecosystem that the Shopify relationship offers us really gives us a lead in terms of being able to move faster than we would if we were trying to do it ourselves.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
It's always a lot easier to have platforms and systems that other people are aware of. And it kind of is headless, kind of not. But having these key components of your business not be custom and only one person on the team knows how it works, they get sick, that's scary.
But if you have something that 's more familiar out there and there's a lot more knowledge about it, it makes things a lot more scalable and easier to fix when things maybe potentially do go wrong.
Back to the Shopify thing, though.
I think that you guys are definitely trailblazing in a sense of being such a... I would say a company that was entrenched in their own technology making that leap. I think we'll probably see a few more people out there kind of fall in behind you.
Kiran Smith
We like to be ahead of the pack sometimes.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?
Kiran Smith
I think something that would resonate with the audience is around growth, and how you think about it from what got you here and how you think about it for the next stage of growth.
For me, that takes a really special leadership team. It takes a really special employee base that's willing to stop, take a look at how things are working and say, “Okay, how do we need to adjust to move forward?”
Because a lot of times you can imagine you just keep doing the same things. You keep iterating on the same things. And unless a company is willing to say, all right, if we're gonna keep wanting to grow, if we're gonna keep wanting to try to trailblaze, break into new parts, giving yourself the time, giving yourself the time to think, the time to plan, the time to strategize, it takes effort. It takes leadership.
But I think that's one of the things I enjoy most about ButcherBox: it's never done. It's always looking to continue to evolve, grow, create more meaningful relationships with our members, and bring new members into the mix. That's one of the things that makes it a really special place and that people are really excited to be a part of.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
There are so many places that have the 80-20 rule. 80-20 exists everywhere. And I was listening to another podcast the other day, talking about where they 20% just try things. Try different advertising campaigns, try different creative, try something new on the website.
You obviously want to focus on the things that you know that are working, but you still need to have some area to explore and to iterate and to just see what happens.
Kiran Smith
I would say ButcherBox is probably the best environment I've ever worked in that truly embraces a test and learn environment. And where someone, those learnings or failures, it is absolutely talked about because you want to.
And I think that people talk about a good game when they say, “No, we want you to fail.”
Not all environments are really supportive of that. I will say ButcherBox really is. It is a data-driven environment. It is a customer-obsessed environment.
And that means it constantly wants to make sure that the people who we have working for us are curious, are looking to try new things, feel comfortable that they can take risks and that there's not a hand slap that's going to happen if it doesn't work. It doesn't work that way.
So I think that's one of those things culturally that people strive for. I think ButcherBox has really done a great job of achieving that.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome.
Obviously, we've talked a lot about the amazing products at ButcherBox.
If I'm curious to learn more about the products, and then also if I'm curious to learn more about you and follow you on the internet, where are some URLs? Where should I go? What are some things I should do?
Kiran Smith
butcherbox.com. Just go there. You'll get all the information you need about what a subscription looks like, gift boxes. Try us out. There's everything you need. If you want to learn more about me, just go to LinkedIn.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome.
Any parting words for some aspiring entrepreneurs that might have ButcherBox on their vision board?
Kiran Smith
I would say that culture can rule a business. What the company that has been built is truly about the animals, the farmers, the planet, and the employees. And that it is the first truly mission-driven company I've been a part of.
A lot of companies say it's mission-driven. This one proves that you can be. And when you work in an environment like that, decision making is a lot easier.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all those insights.
Kiran Smith
Thanks for having me.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!