The CFO Agenda: Raw Sugar Living's Jonathan Weiss
The NetSuite Podcast · Oracle Corporation
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Show Notes
The CFO Agenda: Raw Sugar Living's Jonathan Weiss
00;00;05;07 - 00;00;37;18
Unknown
Hello NetSuite listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in to the network podcast. I'm Megan O'Brien, a co-host of the podcast. Today we're continuing our CFO agenda series with Jonathan Weiss, CFO of Raw Sugar, a health and beauty brand selling premium hair and body products made of natural ingredients. You've probably seen their shampoos, conditioners and other products in their signature white bottles with bamboo tops around Target, Walmart, CVS, etc.
00;00;37;21 - 00;00;58;26
Unknown
We discuss Jonathan's path to the role of the CFO. Hint as not necessarily what you would expect. His perspective on the future of the finance function, the company's tech stack, and some of Raw Sugar's goals over the next year. So stay tuned. You're not going to want to miss this episode.
00;00;58;28 - 00;01;25;15
Unknown
You're listening to the NetSuite Podcast, where we discuss what's happening within NetSuite, why we're doing it, and where we're heading in the future. We'll dive into the details about the software and the people at NetSuite who are behind all the moving parts. We'll also feature customer growth stories discussing the ups and downs of running a company, and how one integrated system can help your business continue to scale.
00;01;25;18 - 00;01;59;04
Unknown
Hi, how are you doing today? Afternoon. This is such a treat. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on. I mean, let's go ahead and just jump right into the questions. So could you talk a bit about your past roles and your path to where you are now? Sure. Well, it's been a long road, but it started with UCLA, undergrad and had this awesome liberal arts education and yet was also able to take about 8 to 10 accounting classes.
00;01;59;04 - 00;02;25;08
Unknown
And from that, I started out at KPMG in New York, working in the audit side, luckily got assigned into the manufacturing retail space, liked it, but didn't love it to be honest, and started kind of my journey to where I am now because, I jumped over to the consulting side and started kind of hoping different partners answer different problems for large corporations.
00;02;25;11 - 00;02;54;28
Unknown
Went off to business school back at UCLA because I wanted to be back in the LA market and then had a great, lucky opportunity when I was about 30, where two founders who had created a fashionable scrubs business long before that was the thing. And I came on kind of as a consultant and would eventually became their partner, and for seven years grew this into a business that really I loved and enjoyed.
00;02;55;01 - 00;03;21;03
Unknown
And for the last 20 years, I've pretty much been doing the same role of CFO CEOs. Sometimes it's been for founders, sometimes it's been for public companies like LVMH. And then for the last eight years it's been with different private equity firms, a liberal arts degree taking accounting classes. You don't hear that very often now, but, it's something I advise all the people I work with because, you know, we'll talk about this.
00;03;21;03 - 00;03;43;27
Unknown
What is the role of finance and accounting now, and especially with outsourcing and big data? You know, at the end of the day, it's a value add. Understand what the information is telling you. And I don't think that's much different than reading a great novel or seeing a movie and trying to understand what it's trying to tell you who communication is.
00;03;43;28 - 00;04;06;20
Unknown
Major me likes that. Okay, so you ended up joining Ross Sugar close to five years ago. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what Ross Sugar does? Yeah, sure. Ross Sugar has been around for about ten years. It's usually a white bottle with a bamboo top, but it was created ten years ago by two founders, Ronnie and Donna.
00;04;06;23 - 00;04;31;08
Unknown
And they had a really unique idea, which was they thought there should be clean products in the main aisle.Now, that doesn't sound like a big idea, but back in 2014, it was, and then they wanted it to look good on your shelf and your counter and your bathroom and your kitchen. And they wanted also to be something that you were proud of and a brand that you were proud of and uniquely.
00;04;31;08 - 00;05;03;01
Unknown
And we could talk about this a little later. They created a business model, not out of digitally native, but out of brick and mortar, and that made them really unique. And I think was really instrumental to their success. What is RawSugar's mission? I think it's evolved basically at scale. When I think about it. But the mission has always been the same, which is it's a kind of a belief that everyone deserves clean products, that there's a range just like the food we eat and the clothes we buy and the emissions we put out.
00;05;03;01 - 00;05;29;01
Unknown
We want to put better products into the market with better ingredients, but that people can afford. And our competitors are not the high-priced prestige brands. They're really Dove and Dial. And now native and love, Beauty Planet and all these other mass players that have come into the market that believe customers, consumers deserve a choice with better ingredients.
00;05;29;04 - 00;05;53;22
Unknown
Yeah, I feel like you guys were such trendsetters in that because it has become a huge movement. But I remember seeing your products around before, kind of all those other players came into it. Yeah, no. And you know, I think what's very great, what I love about our story is that's what drove the founders. And so they started out in liquid hand soap and some lotions and scrubs.
00;05;53;24 - 00;06;21;00
Unknown
Then they saw an opportunity in body wash. Then they saw an opportunity in hair. Then they saw an opportunity in kids. Then they saw an opportunity in Doe. And even this summer we launched a pet care because if we had a kids line, we thought, animals deserve, good ingredients too. So it's that's kind of where the ethos of the company comes from is this idea that there are these categories that need changing.
00;06;21;03 - 00;06;45;06
Unknown
Well, it's funny because now that I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking close to five years ago. So you kind of started at a very Covid time or start of a Covid you time. How did that how did that go? Yeah. You know, exactly. Covid. So made 2020. And sometimes I talk about RawSugar 1.00. Sugar 2.0.
00;06;45;06 - 00;07;18;04
Unknown
And today we're in the third, I think version of it, 1.0 is the Ronnie and Don, the story of creating and founding the brand and making an impact, especially at target. So 2.0, I like to think it was when I came in, I was the 11th employee and the business was doubling because of Covid. One reason because people needed soap too, is we had a very domestic based manufacturing model and we were sourcing some components from Asia, mainly Topps and Ronnie and Don.
00;07;18;04 - 00;07;42;09
Unknown
They realized that Covid was going to be something massive, and they invested in componentry. And so we were on shelf and got a lot of trial by a lot of people when our competitors were out of stock. And I came along because of that dramatic increase in the first 45 days of Covid, and I've been in the LA area for a long time, and this is kind of what I, I don't want to say specialize in.
00;07;42;09 - 00;08;10;27
Unknown
But really this journey of professionalizing a business, of allowing founders to do what they do and to create structure around that. But financial structure but also supply chain structure and channel structure and strategy. And so I kind of came in to help them scale this business. And so I was employee number 11. And today we're 40. So just to give you a sense of the scale of how much the business has changed since I'vecome along, that's amazing.
00;08;10;27 - 00;08;34;23
Unknown
Yeah, they probably were like, we need help ready to scale because everyone wants soap nowadays. Yeah. And just from a finance and accounting perspective, you know, I look back, the first thing I feel like I learned in business school. I love analogies. And our teams will laugh because I use them all the time. But like I think about backpacking and to be successful you need a great dashboard.
00;08;34;23 - 00;08;57;20
Unknown
You need to know where you're pointed and orient yourself. You need to know how fast you're moving. You know, you need to know the resources you require to get to where you want to go. And so I've always looked at this role that I play with the partner in the founders is to help them understand that because success creates a lot of challenges on a cash level.
00;08;57;20 - 00;09;17;05
Unknown
Surprisingly on an inventory level, on a channel, conflict level on a supply chain, capacity level. So there's a lot of things you have to manage through success. And a lot of actual constraints. And so that's kind of how I'vealways looked at the finance and accounting role. But I've also always looked at how I look at my relationship with the founders.
00;09;17;05 - 00;09;38;25
Unknown
I've gotten to work with. Yeah. And I think we kind of like we talk about this sometimes, but probably not enough sometimes. I think, you know, you think of success and growth and everything as, oh, we get there and it's smooth sailing and it's like, well, no, it brings its own set of challenges. Oh, no. Look, at the end of the day, people make things happen for brands.
00;09;38;25 - 00;10;05;01
Unknown
The technology platforms that you use realize, that talent and give us the information that we are and where to go. But when you hit a certain scale as the business hit in that spring of 2020, tying it into exactly what you're saying is, I remember the first thing Ronnie said to me is like, I have no idea how much money, we need, to communicate to the bank.
00;10;05;03 - 00;10;37;00
Unknown
I don't know how much more componentry we need, how many more ingredients and componentry we requireto meet the demand we're seeing. And so all of those things, and we were working at that time off of QuickBooks and getting our head around that and trying to create that narrative of what it was going to take us to continue to be successful is kind of what the role accounting and finances play then, and kind of place today.
00;10;37;03 - 00;11;01;12
Unknown
And this is probably a tough one to answer. I'm sure it changes, but if you had to kind of summarize it, what does a typical day in your shoes look like? You know, so it's changed a lot. You know, the bigger the organization gets, the more competency and capacities you have. So when I started out, it was Ronnie and Donna's humility to understand they need someone like myself.
00;11;01;15 - 00;11;29;16
Unknown
And then almost immediately, my I started hiring people in the areas that weren't my strength, supply chain and planning systems. And it, and eventually an accounting manager in some other areas. So today, to answer that question, my day is so different than it was 4 or 5 years ago. My day now is really working down, you know, with my team, making sure they have their priorities set.
00;11;29;16 - 00;11;54;01
Unknown
They understand where the rest of the organization's going, what deadlines are approaching, what questions we're trying to answer. But a lot of the work is across. So I like to think that my favorite part of being a CFO is all the stakeholders. I kind of have the privilege of getting to work with and be in conversation with. So that'sthe VP of marketing, that's the VP of ops.
00;11;54;03 - 00;12;16;00
Unknown
But it's also our private equity firm, our lender, and sometimes our brokers who work directly with our channel partners. So it varies so much and it's kind of, you know, makes that's what I love about what I do. And now I have a team underneath me that I can really work with and know that they're going to execute.
00;12;16;00 - 00;12;46;11
Unknown
And so I spend a lot more of my time outside the finance and accounting function than inside it. You participated in a keynote this year at SuiteWorld with Sam Levy, who's the SVP of Growth and Operations at NetSuite. So what was that experience like? Oh it's fantastic. I mean, I giggle about it. I went to UCLA Business School 25 years ago and people take different paths and mine is always been under the radar.
00;12;46;17 - 00;13;08;15
Unknown
And so to kind of go in front of a large room and get to talk about raw sugar, which to me is like encapsulatesall the work that came before. It was just such a thrill and really fun. And then on top of it, it's and not to push the product, but I really feel like that suite is like always it's the product they always wished for.
00;13;08;19 - 00;13;26;21
Unknown
And so our road and our growth and, Raw Sugar, it's kind of let us leverage that. So it was really fun chatting with Sam and I like I have to clarify for people, I mean, this was not just a large room. I mean, this was a keynote tent in Vegas. Thousands of people type thing. I mean, huge.
00;13;26;23 - 00;13;50;11
Unknown
So that's like a big jump. Yeah. No. And people joke with me like they're like, did you, you know, see me that big? Did you, do you, have you done a big room before? And I was like, no, no, no. Just kind of think what you get over a hundred. It all feels the same. Yeah, I guess I get that point, you know, you can't quite see that far back, so maybe it just feels the same.
00;13;50;11 - 00;14;13;10
Unknown
It's public speaking at a point. Yeah. And I think the other side and again you hear me if I refer to Ronnie and Don to like Don is still very engaged in our business. And so one of the reasons why both of us continue to be engaged is we're trying to make this brand a forever brand. We talk about it and, you know, you there are financial goals for our investors.
00;14;13;12 - 00;14;33;12
Unknown
We all participate in our success. But like at the core, we could be doing a lot of different things. And what we really want is more people to be aware of Raw Sugar. And, and frankly, for me, I'll say for people to be proud and aware of our team that's just done an amazing job and in a very unique environment.
00;14;33;15 - 00;14;52;18
Unknown
It's funny because it is just in a way, it's a very indirect promotion and all of that in a way, because I've seen products at NetSuite's SuiteWorld and all of a sudden said, yeah, I'm going to start buying that. So interviewed the CFO of Johnny Pops, which was, popsicle brand a couple of years back at SuiteWorld.
00;14;52;20 - 00;15;17;04
Unknown
I now buy their popsicles. I like all of a sudden saw Raw Sugar at Target, and I was like, yeah, okay. Like, as soon as I see a customer name, I'm like, yeah, I kind of want to buy it now. Oh, well, that makes it even more worthwhile. And you kind of alluded to this, earlier, but in the keynote you broke down Raw Sugar's growth journey into three phases: 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.
00;15;17;07 - 00;15;40;14
Unknown
Can you kind of explain those phases to our listeners? Not sure. I mean, I referenced that earlier and did it in the context I think of the team. You know, a 1.0 was a founder driven model, 2.0 is that transition of scaling and bringing in talent, and three is this journey we've been on for a couple of years now.
00;15;40;14 - 00;16;03;21
Unknown
We call it clean for all I is, but it's once we had some private equity investment. The second quality of it is we had, we've really built a leadership team. I mentioned the VP of supply chain and VP of marketing and a CEO, Mike Maki, who were lucky enough to come over from Johnson and Johnson and OG, a brand that also plays in the clean space.
00;16;03;23 - 00;16;26;29
Unknown
So those characteristics. But most of all, we went for the all, which is the brand was really built out of Target and then Walgreens and then Kroger. So brick and mortar players and Ronnie and Donna would always pick one player who they felt it was the right place to start. So that when you create that level of partnership and work with the consumer.
00;16;26;29 - 00;16;49;21
Unknown
So this next this 3.0 post-Covid, now we're in Walmart. We're on Amazon, we have a DTC site. We are also in CVS. We're also in Kroger as well as Albertsons. We're in Mexico as well as in Canada. So like we're really now trying to take our mission and find as many customers we can wherever we can be impactful.
00;16;49;27 - 00;17;17;15
Unknown
Going from brick and mortar to e-commerce, it's kind of the opposite of what we usually see. What was the thought behind that? Yeah, no, I, I early on told Ronnie and that would be the Harvard business case. If we go all the way, because in 2014, people really wanted to own their customer. People believe that the margin they were able to gather and the email list, they could be that was the way to build the business.
00;17;17;15 - 00;17;47;15
Unknown
And Ronnie and Donna came from a different place, Ronnie, and worked, working with, importing and bringing in things from Asia and really understood manufacturing. Grew up in that family that had a soap business and Don that worked in the brokerage side and worked with major retailers like Target and Walmart and CVS. And so when they came together to create the brand, they really understood that there was an opportunity for buyers.
00;17;47;21 - 00;18;23;12
Unknown
And when I mean buyers meeting at target, especially to help shape a brand that they would then get the traffic for. And when they said that, they said, and we're now going to make this a digital brand, we're going to nurture it in the brick-and-mortar space, and we're going to pick strategic partners. And that was both very unique, but ends up being very smart because it really created a very deep relationship with target that went all the way through to we were brands of the year in the beauty space in 2020, and that allowed the brand to learn, learn what the customer wanted.
00;18;23;12 - 00;18;45;01
Unknown
And there were definitely changes and evolutionary steps along the way, but it really created that level of partnership that sometimes when you're digital or you're grabbing your own set of the profit or your own relationship with the customer, I think the buyers, are more in a competitive situation and it really worked well for us and was a very unique strategy.
00;18;45;01 - 00;19;10;14
Unknown
I can't think of. Another brand started in the teens that, went that way. Yeah, yeah, but I mean, it does make sense because, like, I do I mean, from my personal experience, it's kind of like you go into a store and you're like, oh, this is a really cool bottle. And oh, it's clean ingredients. And then you kind of like, build out awareness there, and that's how you make your purchases a lot of times in that space.
00;19;10;16 - 00;19;40;09
Unknown
Yeah. No. And it's I can just from my prior experience, I worked with a brand called Ulla Henriksen that was acquired by Louis Vuitton and Louis Vuitton. LVMH also owns Sephora, and now there's a whole division called Kendo Brands. But essentially the concept is why should someone shop at Ulta versus Sephora? One of the reasons is to create exclusive relationships with brands.
00;19;40;12 - 00;20;01;12
Unknown
And so it's not the only place that it's happening, but on the brand side, you usually really seek out and find whatever relationship you can, for sales and to be disciplined and say only the brick and mortar is really unique. Okay. Today, the day that I learned that Sephora is owned by Louis Vuitton, that is true.
00;20;01;15 - 00;20;30;18
Unknown
No idea. And, also an amazing place. And the mask space is very different than the prestige space. So it's, that was a great five years. I learned a ton. And, you know, going back to my early start working in public accounting is that's where it really paid dividends, because I really wore both hats. I was part of a small organization with less than $50 million of revenue but was reporting to a public company.
00;20;30;18 - 00;20;50;18
Unknown
And so the public accounting that I learned early on, next, with the work I had done with founders to that point, kind of came together and allowed, I think, that entity to have a lot more space to grow and not kind of, get consumed by a large multinational because we were able to kind of wear both hats.
00;20;50;20 - 00;21;18;23
Unknown
Yeah, that's a great mix of expertise, new and super unique experience. And, you know, really kind of joyful and a brand, I mean, one of the other great parts, I have two teenage daughters and, they really care, what beauty brands I work with. I'm less beauty focused. But, when you start building your career out and you start looking at these brands and seeing them on the shelf, it makes you really proud.
00;21;18;25 - 00;21;47;03
Unknown
Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. So how has raw sugar been using that? Sweet. Honestly, in almost every way. I'mblushing because I feel like I'm selling it, but I will take it dinner with a bunch of CFOs. I'd say the same thing. I worked with Sage. I've worked in QuickBooks environments. I've worked in SAP environments as SAP one especially, and NetSuite for us is the center that we like.
00;21;47;07 - 00;22;12;17
Unknown
We literally have a person who's not an IT expert, but who came in from an ops department of another beauty brand to literally help us implement that suite and then connect NetSuite to all of our business value opportunities. And it's a relationship. So just to think about it, to give you a context, the way we use NetSuite, we use NetSuite to connect.
00;22;12;20 - 00;22;34;20
Unknown
So we have we have three plus in warehouses. We have FDI coming in for all of these retailers for our orders, but also for our payment notifications and our own shipping notifications. We also have planning and budgeting. We need to do so. We use NetSuite Planning and budgeting to do more of our forecasting and some of our demand planning.
00;22;34;26 - 00;23;09;20
Unknown
But then we also use a tool called it which is trade promotions, which is a really big part of being a mass brand.And all the discounts, people saying buy one, get one freeze and markdowns and all those things that happen, they take the price down. Well, those getting charged back to the brand and us being able to track those programs and those promotions and understand the financial obligation and the accruals necessary, are just different ways we were able to use NetSuite to keep track of our business.
00;23;09;24 - 00;23;34;20
Unknown
Why is having a strong tech stack so important specifically for Raw Sugar? Well, I think it's important for everyone. If you go back to the backpacker analogy and what I learned in business school, to know where you are in order to know where you're going, well, now it's exponentially more challenging. The marginal cost for new data is so small, we can get POS information.
00;23;34;22 - 00;23;57;24
Unknown
We can get all of our information from NetSuite, but you have to have the right tech stack to interpret that information. We use NetSuite Planning and Budgeting as a reporting tool, so we can really understand our different channels. So our profitability for Target and Walmart are very different than drug. Then they're very different than our digital channels.
00;23;57;24 - 00;24;42;01
Unknown
And never mind our distribution relationships. And international. So having the right tools allows us to do what's fundamentally and I probably should have said this earlier, but my big joy but also fundamental belief, it's frankly why I like doing podcasts and things like that is I think, CFOs and this goes back to the first partner I worked for, KPMG, who said this to me in the 90s is they're scarcity driven, that they're basically playing a role of finger wagons and counting and scorekeepers, and what they actually are sitting on a treasure trove of value and information that can drive decision making throughout an organization.
00;24;42;04 - 00;25;08;09
Unknown
And so I try to articulate to everyone and our team, but also cross-functionally across our management team is we want finance and accounting to be an informational source to drive value driven opportunity cost decisions. We want to have the best information we can to make better decisions in a timely fashion, and that puts you on the for the front foot and not the back foot.
00;25;08;09 - 00;25;36;12
Unknown
It's not just the reporting package we're trying to do here. We're actually that's a very small amount of what we're trying to do. What we're really trying to do is inform better decision making. And so coupling that suite with other tools like data we get for our point-of-sale information, data we get from our factories, data we get from Shopify as an example, and Amazon being able to leverage all that data and bring it together.
00;25;36;12 - 00;25;58;23
Unknown
NetSuite allows us to do it and then we're able to create information for the organization. Oh man. That is just kind of so spot on to themes that we've been touching on recently. This idea of the CFO being a very strategic business partner and driving value within the organization, not kind of like not as much the back office.
00;25;58;23 - 00;26;26;11
Unknown
We're going to report the numbers after they've happened, you know, and it's just kind of interesting to see that transition. And this person said this to me in 1995. So yeah, just to give you a context of, you know, how meaningful that and if you tie that to then my liberal arts education, it's why I kind of to me the accounting and is really just learning foreign language.
00;26;26;14 - 00;26;55;28
Unknown
It's learning a way to articulate what's happening and to communicate across the organization. The real value is the decision-making process and trying to help marketing and the CEO and our investors and our lenders sometime understand the trajectory of our business and where our where, where there's profit, where there's investment. And that's really I just again, that's what NetSuite does for us without question.
00;26;55;28 - 00;27;21;13
Unknown
And it does it with more and more low-cost data that needs to be transformed into high value information. A big theme at SuiteWorld was, very unsurprisingly, AI. As the technology advances, where do you see it having the most potential for Raw Sugar? I went to SuiteWorld last year and I was excited about.
00;27;21;13 - 00;27;46;06
Unknown
I came back and I spoke to a bunch of different stakeholders for our business, and I said, it's not really thereyet. This year at SuiteWorld, I could really see it. I could see it with some of the applications that seem obvious to me like exception management, automated coding, you know, a credit card bill. They should someone showed walked me through, impacting your cash flow.
00;27;46;06 - 00;28;11;18
Unknown
I mean, within NetSuite, you've got your AR, you've got your app, you've got your order history, you can upload a demand plan. You should be able to do quality cash flow forecasting. And I think that appears to me to be on the horizon. The areas that are next level that I think NetSuite is going to arrive at sooner than later.
00;28;11;20 - 00;28;52;06
Unknown
But where it will really impact our business, I think, is demand planning is a great example. And the reason is because I can kind of you really are talking about very large data sets now from very for a lot of different sources. And so if you can both be in the warehouse as well as the accumulator of the data, and then have the tools to kind of bring that together to express an opinion frankly, which is what I really will do, that will really allow a lot more information to be consumed a lot faster than maybe humans can even or potentially could do.
00;28;52;13 - 00;29;18;05
Unknown
I think about a lot like Excel versus QuickBooks versus NetSuite, and then you've got stuff A has. NetSuite. But the a lot of the work we do right now, even though it happens in that suite, is still very Excel thinking. And I think, having the intelligence of AI should really kind of advance things very quickly. Yeah.
00;29;18;05 - 00;29;25;12
Unknown
Let's get out of those spreadsheets over it. Sure.
00;29;25;15 - 00;29;42;17
Unknown
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00;29;42;20 - 00;30;04;10
Unknown
Well, this leads in pretty well to our next question. What do you think the future of the finance function will look like? Yeah, you know, it starts with what I've always believed in and was lucky enough to get taught and introduced to, which is finance and accounting need to be always on the cutting edge of being a value-addpartner.
00;30;04;13 - 00;30;33;06
Unknown
And, you know, partner internally. Partner regularly regulatory wise, but also external stakeholders and all the decisions need to make. So anything that brings that level of thought and decision-making ability is critical. And what I'm interviewing, you know, that I can teach someone how to take their prior knowledge and then apply it to Raw Sugars.
00;30;33;06 - 00;31;07;18
Unknown
Business. I can teach them how to think like that's just unrealistic. And so, you know, we want to have fine members of our team and and a great example is, you know, and this isn't new, but, you know, it's becoming so easy with technology now with teams and zoom to use, coding from Asia, you know, not just for coding, but AP entry or billing or all these other areas that allows a low value commodity transaction to take place at a lower cost.
00;31;07;21 - 00;31;28;17
Unknown
But the thinking still needs to happen. And the problems and or my analogy would be like, I'd say team is like, we should be using the system as our highway and we should spending 85% of our time, on the service road and the exceptions. And when we're spending time there, we should be asking the question, why is this an exception, and how do we get it back on the highway?
00;31;28;20 - 00;32;01;23
Unknown
You know, what is what is what do we have to change in our process with our contract manufacturer? What do we have? Who do we have to talk to with our brick-and-mortar partner? Or what? How do we need to build between that suite and this partner? Like those are the things we should be doing. And then we should then be taking the information and constantly be thinking about what are ways to more objectively understand what subjectively we're assessing in the marketplace.
00;32;01;23 - 00;32;33;22
Unknown
And I'll give you a perfect example, is we have a demand plan. So internally we assess three months, six months, 12 months what we're going to create inventory around. And yet we're also getting weekly data of what consumers are consuming. And so a year ago those things were not talking to each other. Today, leaderof demand planning has to speak to in meetings.
00;32;33;24 - 00;33;11;26
Unknown
What is the relationship between the demand planning they are presenting and the consumption that they'reseeing? And we're able to do that in a data structure and that it's no extra work for them. It's really just telling them how those two different data sets are talking to each other. So it's a perfect example. You didn't need AI to do that, but putting an objective lens now we can understand how we're going to put our dollars into our demand plan relates to what the is telling us, because it used to just be the retailer told you that information and they're really not accountable for it.
00;33;11;26 - 00;33;33;29
Unknown
And so they have an interest in telling you a big number to make sure you have inventory on hand, but then they're not accountable for it and they're not necessarily going to buy off of that. And they also might have notas strong of a demand planning team on their side. So us being able to tie our plans to what the consumer is telling us, well, that's really interesting.
00;33;33;29 - 00;34;02;19
Unknown
And there's all kinds of more product development and marketing questions that also reside in that data, because that we're also running promotions at those times. So what kind of lifts are we getting? That's data. Those are answered. But there are also different fragrances we use and how they're being reacted to how seasonal they are. What is the reaction in different parts of the country, even, to our lip balm based on temperature and cold.
00;34;02;26 - 00;34;40;29
Unknown
So all of these things are there to be mined and they become objective. If we, we spend the time to create the right structure around it. That's super interesting. I don't even think about, like, lip balm and temperature and everything like that, you know, it's I mean, that's and that's where I was going to come in because there are all these patterns in the data that, you know, it's also someone told me a long time ago, you know, the problem is connecting all of this data and all this computer power to value to margin of marginal cost versus marginal value.
00;34;41;00 - 00;35;03;28
Unknown
The marginal cost has gone so far down to get information, but now we're just sitting in pools of data. And so how do we find those key pieces of information and pull them out of the data to inform us. That's really hard.And that's why, you know, computers will where I will go down a certain road, but it's still realizing patterns.
00;35;04;00 - 00;35;29;03
Unknown
It's the questions that we have to ask and how I understand the brand. I think there's still a real big rolefinance, accounting, the whole team, frankly. And I'm especially interested in your answer to this question because you don't necessar