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Aaron Woolf from Trendii | Checkout #447
In today’s Checkout episode, we are joined by Aaron Woolf, founder of Trendii, a platform revolutionising the way we shop by integrating product recommendations into digital content. Aaron shares an interesting purchase of a mysterious shoe cleaning paste from Instagram and discusses his admiration for retailers like Incu and Farfetch and highlights the tech he relies on to run his business. He shares some sources of inspiration including Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE and The Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters and highlights the importance of balancing work and downtime in the fast-paced world of ecommerce.
Check out our full-length interview with Aaron Woolf here:
The Power of Contextual Advertising: Insights from Aaron Woolf of Trendii | #433
About our guest:
With over 15 years of experience in online marketing, Aaron has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the digital landscape and how to leverage data, technology and creativity to deliver value for clients and users. As the Founder and CEO of Trendii, Aaron leads a passionate and talented team that helps brands enhance sales and engagement through innovative, user-friendly shopping experiences. Using proprietary AI and computer vision, they connect media content with shoppable products, enabling creators, platforms and publishers to monetise their work while offering users a more engaging, personalised shopping journey.
About your host:
Nathan Bush is the host of the Add To Cart podcast and a leading ecommerce transformation consultant. He has led eCommerce for businesses with revenue $100m+ and has been recognised as one of Australia’s Top 50 People in eCommerce four years in a row. You can contact Nathan on LinkedIn or via email.
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- Broadcast on:
- 19 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
I've got a question for you and I want you to be honest with me. Does your business partnership program go beyond snacks for your posty and contra with your local pub? I hope so. If I was to have found out that brands with mature partnership programs grow revenue twice as fast and see 20% of their revenue come from emerging partnerships. I'd love to see your local pub do that for you. To get a kickstart and partner with some of the world's most credible content creators, influencers, mobile apps and other brands on a performance basis, check out IMPACT, a technology company transforming the way we do partnerships at scale. Visit IMPACT.com/growth. Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous ad to cut guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy. Today's checkout features Aaron Wolf, the visionary founder behind Trendy. That's Trendy with two eyes at the end. Trendy is revolutionizing the way that we interact with content by seamlessly integrating shopping experiences directly into the media that we consume. With clients including Freedom, Maya, Temple and Webster, and integrated on networks such as news.com, domain and Vogue Living, Trendy is connecting content with relevant advertising. Aaron, welcome to the checkout. We had a great conversation around everything that you're building at Trendy from how we match products all over the publishing world, including fashion sites, to how to match paint colors for customers, wherever they might come across them, even the future of TV and how we're going to shop on TV, which was fantastic to hear, but we've got five questions to hear more about you. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online? I bought from Instagram a shoe cleaning paste and it took two months to arrive. It was stuck in customs for about three weeks and it came and it's all Chinese, you can't read a word of it and it's the best shoe cleaning product that you can buy. Honestly, it's unbelievable and I have absolutely no idea where to get it again. Why was it throwing customers for that long? I mean, who knows what the hell it is? It's just some weird bag, it's got like a Chinese official stamp on it. I've got them. I've got those what they thought it was. It's a weird white powder that you can't, but yeah, exactly right, yeah, it's a weird white paste. Anyway. All right, well clean shoes, clean shoes as well, you never know, just give it a taste. Number two, which retailer has most inspired you recently? So I love what Inku are doing in Australia. I think they've done incredibly good things with building a brand, not only by bringing unknown premium overseas brands into Australia, like brands like Lieutenant Bachuzzi, they do a lot of stuff with acne and other brands, like these brands are growing obviously, but they've done incredibly well by kind of leaning on these overseas brands and then bringing them in. They also have their own brands that it's fantastic and obviously it's just absolutely crushing it. So I love those guys. Farfetch, another one, I think are doing a lot of really interesting things in the experiential physical world, I'm a big believer in shopping should be experiential rather than just walking in and kind of picking something off a rack, trying it on and buying it. I think there needs to be more there. What that looks like, I don't know, but I'm not really in the bricks and mortar world, but maybe one day we'll be, but yeah, I'd say that they're doing incredibly good things. I think both of those pick up on the theme that we talked about in our main episode around the power of discovery, those brands like Dagen, what the team at Inku are doing is phenomenal because you walk into an Inku store and I'm definitely not cool enough to be a good owner. It's so funny. I said that to my partner the other day, I said, do I, am I dressed well enough to walk into Inku today and have a look, am I, you know, am I shoes clean enough? Do I look good enough? It's like a bouncer on the door, just looking you up and down, and it's like they've created this brand that makes you, you want to feel like you're worthy of them. And it's like, isn't that insane? It's incredible. If you walk in there, well, you speak to any of the team and they are the most friendliest down to earth people you've ever come across. And they sell all sorts of different price points, right? So it's not all premium stuff, but yeah, no, I love it. I love what they sell. I love all the brands they sell. But I can imagine in an environment around content, especially around fashion content, being able to put new Inku product up there against that kind of content as a discoverability medium or a trendy would be really powerful. Oh, mate. Well, we'd love to work with Inku if they're listening, reach out and see what we can do for you guys. But yeah, no, I'd love to, I'd love to work with them when they got, yeah, absolutely. And to be honest with you, a lot of the stuff they sell would be matching incredibly well to a lot of the stuff that's being worn and all the events, because let's be honest, it's very, it's very current and very cool stuff. So, yeah. I reckon we're going to get a text message from dog arses. Hopefully. We're going to be real. Wouldn't that be cool? I'll put him in it. All right. Number three, name a piece of tech that you or your e-commerce business or trendy, couldn't live without. So I'm a bit old school, I'm going to have to go with email. I know. I mean, I know there's linear and I know slack and I know there's all these other things that people use all day every day, but to be honest with you, I have an incredibly good team that use all of that stuff and they do incredibly well using it all. I mean, look slack, obviously, to put things in and then we've got linear to log tickets and everything else. But the reality is, I'm doing 150, 200 emails a day and all day doing emails. And without it, I don't think I'd be able to function. So, yeah, it's definitely got to be email for me. Forgive me for being perhaps a little bit old school. No, no, no, I just feel sorry if there's more on that than emails. Yeah. I think I've got some in the region of about 23,000 unread emails. So I do have to start cleaning up my inbox. But anyway, do you ever see a future where trendy recommendations and product matching finds its way into promotional or campaign emails as well? Look, the email is going to come from a brand. The brand is going to already know the products that consumers want wanted or clicked on engage with. With that email from publishers. And email from a publisher, connect some brands, products and automation. Maybe, maybe, maybe, you've just given me three sleepless nights. Thank you. I had that on top of your email, you'd be like, I'm just going to go and solve this problem now. Thanks. Thanks, nation. It's a problem I didn't know. It's a problem I didn't know needed to be solved. And now I'm going to go and try and figure it out. It might not be. I mean, yeah, maybe, dynamic, dynamic email, HTML, let me let me let me anyway. All right. I'll leave that with you. I'll come back to you. If it becomes something, I'll, you know, by lunch, how's that? Well, I mean, new t-shirt. Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into? I mean, I love reading autobiographies of people that have achieved things. I've recently read Phil Knight's autobiography, "Shoe Dog," and thought that was absolutely just mind-blowing. And I think one of the reasons why I loved it so much is because there's so much. It's not losing my virginity, it was probably one of the first I read, which is Branson's. And I read that and it's very, it's very self-indulgent. It's very fluffy. I hope he's not listening. He's good. He's a regularist, okay, I loved his book, best book of over it. It was a little bit kind of everything just went according to plan. Oh, of course it is. Well, hang on. Did it? Did it really? No business goes according to plan. I don't care who you are. I don't care how big and successful you are. You know, you've got stories about Amazon having a phone call away from bankruptcy. There's little things that you kind of know about from these people that have built these businesses. There's a lot in that book that's really raw and real and honest, and I think it's just one of those books you absolutely have to read. And then Chimp Paradox haven't gotten too into it yet, but I don't know if you're familiar with the Chimp Paradox, but the idea is that there's three parts of your brain. There's the chimp, the human, and then there's your robot or your storage and storage is essentially everything that you know to be true, like you know that you have to pull down on a door handle to open a door, that sort of thing. So the idea is that the Chimp is five times stronger than the human, and so the Chimp part of your brain is very much about impulse, instincts, reactionary, got to do things blah, blah, blah, and it can be very overpowering to the human. So the Chimp Paradox is all about not controlling the Chimp, but managing it and basically having a way of managing your sort of mind and those other things. It was recommended to a friend by a friend of mine that's done about 50 Iron Man's. So it obviously helped him, so I'm going to give that a go. And then go to an Iron Man. And then while he keeps pushing me, I don't know if I've got the legs for it anyway. Love it. Last question I've got for you, Aaron. What is your biggest challenge today? I think the biggest challenge is sometimes switching off and the importance of switching off to reframe, refocus and come back to what you were doing. A lot of focus in my young years when I was sort of in my twenties and early thirties was very much about work long hours, work big weeks, hustle culture, work work work work and I think what I've realized in the trendy journey is that it doesn't make you better, more productive, deliver a better product and have a better outcome because remarkably some of the problems you solve might be ones you think of while you're sitting under a tree staring at the sky and if you're so busy focusing on what's happening you can't actually take a look at what's happening, you're just so busy in the zone so that's probably for me one of my biggest challenges is actually remembering to do that because by the time I realize that it's 4 o'clock on a Friday afternoon and I've only had lunch once that week and so it does get a bit tricky but I do try and find time to get away from it just completely switch off, turn my phone off for an hour and do other things. That's a good tip, I once had a business coach who would always start our calls of are you in the blue zone or the red zone? Oh really? Yeah, literally like if you're in the red zone, the red zone is the doing zone, you're pumping out emails, it's like you're making decisions, you're going, you're going, you're going, blue zone is that safe space that's sitting under the tree where you can think of new ideas and you have space for other ideas to come in so she had a bunch of exercises to move us from the red zone when we're rushing to finish an email, whatever, to jump on a call to move us into the blue zone which I think is really important. Yeah, great, I mean you can't rush solutions either, you know, sometimes they do take as long as they take and you've just got to wait for that but I think, you know, I've been around the block a bit, you know, I've worked in the industry now 20 years so I know things eventually do come so it's trusting that process but yeah, finding time to do it and you know, dedicating to it's really crucial but so yeah, love it Aaron, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout, my pleasure, thanks so much for having me. To hear more from Aaron, jump back into episode 433 where Aaron shares how trendy reduces friction in the purchasing journey by embedding relevant products directly to inspirational content. We also look at the various ways that publishers and brands can leverage trendy's technology to drive engagement and sales especially through the middle part of that funnel and we look into the future with some stargazing strategies on the future of contextual commerce including potential streaming service integration, social media and who knows, maybe even a bit of VR. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cart. [Music] [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]