$9M to $25M in 2 Years: Measurement and Attribution for Prestige Brands With Jessica Curdi

Jessica Curdi is the Vice President of Digital Marketing at The Beauty Bank, an innovative beauty brand holder leading digital marketing strategy across a portfolio of emerging brands. As a seasoned digital marketer, she has over 15 years of experience in the fashion and beauty industry, having worked with consumer brands, including StriVectin, L’Oreal, and Warp + Weft. Jessica specializes in brand awareness, customer acquisition, and fostering retention and loyalty.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[0:57] How Jessica Curdi's methodical approach to digital marketing fueled rapid growth at StriVectin
[6:40] Jessica's insights into balancing performance-focused and brand-centric advertising
[8:10] The importance of retention marketing strategies in maintaining customer loyalty after rapid growth
[13:37] What is Simpson’s Paradox, and how does it impact ad performance?
[20:19] Strategies for mitigating the effects of iOS 14.5 on digital marketing
[25:56] The challenges of scaling a brand’s ad spend from zero in just three months
[32:14] Driving traffic to retail versus DTC websites
[39:44] Why Jessica finds value in nurturing her analytical skills
[51:25] How Jessica's personal penchant for dance reflects her adaptability and creativity in the professional realm

In this episode…

Are revenue plateaus in your e-commerce business holding you back? Implementing foundational digital marketing strategies may be the key to unlocking explosive growth.

With iOS 14.5 altering the way companies collect consumer data, digital marketing remains a top challenge for many brands. Digital marketer and e-commerce maven Jessica Curdi insists on returning to the basics of marketing, stating that structuring your strategies around profitable growth areas can help you scale effectively. Once you’ve established a stable foundation, you can begin integrating brand storytelling with performance marketing to communicate your brand’s and product’s benefits to your customers. Throughout each growth phase, retain customers by tracking their journey through multi-touch attribution. No matter which marketing strategy you employ, Jessica advises continuously testing and analyzing marketing campaigns to refine your strategies.

In today’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Jessica Curdi, the VP of Digital Marketing at The Beauty Bank, about the role of digital marketing in brand growth. Jessica explains the necessity of a solid analytical approach in marketing, foundational work on marketing strategies, the significance of customer retention, choosing an ideal marketing agency, and the evolution of digital marketing post-iOS 14.5.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"Take a beat and just understand the foundation that you're working with before acting."
"You're not going to know what works until you try it, and what worked before doesn't necessarily work now."
"It helps to have the right answers or at least to look for the answers you're looking for during the RFP process with agencies."
"It's so much art and science, finding that balance in marketing strategies."
"Every month, ask the question, ‘Should we try this?’ to assess and pivot your marketing strategies effectively."

Action Steps

Analyze each marketing channel's performance individually to avoid falling into Simpson's Paradox: This helps in understanding which creative or campaign truly drives conversions, as opposed to solely looking at aggregate performance.
Utilize multi-touch attribution to get a holistic view of the customer journey: Multi-touch attribution provides a clearer understanding of each touchpoint's impact on the path to conversion, addressing the challenge of limited last-click data.
In uncertain environments, adopt a test-and-learn approach but maintain a strong focus on analyzing the results: The real value in experimentation lies in leveraging the insights gathered to refine strategies, which is especially important when dealing with new markets or products.
Prioritize building relationships and trust with non-digital colleagues by breaking down complex analytics into key takeaways: Making data digestible encourages buy-in and fosters collaboration across different departments, leading to more comprehensive and effective digital marketing strategies.
Incorporate brand awareness campaigns to complement direct conversion efforts: Brand awareness helps fill the marketing funnel and can lead to incremental gains that direct conversion campaigns may miss out on.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now, let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:13

Hey, everyone, I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt in the host of the Up Arrow Podcast where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond, as well as help you apparel, your business and your personal life. Today, I have Jessica Curdi. Jessica has over 15 years of experience working on consumer brands in the fashion and beauty space including StriVectin, L'Oreal and wine app, helping them reach growth objectives through e-commerce and digital marketing transformation. Her expertise spans brand awareness, growth and acquisition and retention and loyalty. She is currently the VP of Digital Marketing at The Beauty Bank, an innovative brand beauty brand incubator leading digital marketing strategy across the growing portfolio of brands. Jessica, I'm excited to have you here.

Jessica Curdi 0:57

Yeah. Nice to talk to you. Well, excited to be here, too. I,

William Harris 1:02

you were introduced to me. This is the first time by my brother, Michael Harris, the founder of bamboo software, because I believe you guys studied at ESSEC, which we'll get to a little bit below. But Michael, thanks for the thing, the introduction here.

Jessica Curdi 1:16

Thanks, Mike.

William Harris 1:19

Cool. So I want to get into the meat here. There's some really good stuff we're gonna be talking about you went from 9 million to 25 million with Dr. ActOn. Before we dig into that, I do want to announce our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired with one that sold for nearly 800,000,001, that IPO recently, you can learn more on our website@elumynt.com, which is spelled elumynt.com. That said, all of the good stuff, 9 million to 25 million in about two years with StriVectin. How was the process?

Jessica Curdi 1:58

Well, I will just preface that to say that was obviously not me alone, we had an absolutely winning team over there with an amazing product, we had a great consumer experience on the website, really, really strong clinicals that as a clinical beauty brand. So just it was really whatever the opposite of a perfect storm is, it was just the perfect situation for me to step into, and really build a digital marketing strategy. That said, from my perspective, really what I came in, at the very beginning was just to and this is i It's so basic, but take a beat and just understand the lay of the land and understand the foundation that you're working with. I know it's very tempting to sometimes come in and act immediately. That is, that's not my style. And I don't necessarily recommend it for anyone. But what we what I really did was just like come in, understand the lay of the land, and then just start like rebuilding the different pieces of the foundation, channel by channel. Starting with our digital marketing agency, we were working with an agency at the time, that was great at certain things, we actually kept them on to do other parts of our marketing. But we then transferred all of our digital marketing to a, an expert agency, let's call it that really understood the nuances of digital marketing performance media. You know, what it meant to build a strategy that was focused on conversion and row as and not just reach and impressions, the easy trap to fall into so that's, that was like kind of phase one. Then from there, just evaluating some other parts of our Mar tech stack. So we switched our email ESP to something that was just a little bit more intuitive and more appropriate for the business. We launched SMS marketing. Yeah, we just really, we start starting from scratch, we we probably we laid the foundation. And then we went up from there. What

William Harris 3:58

I liked the foundation approach, there's a really good book 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell. And he talks about this idea, it's like, and I'm gonna butcher the quote, but something along the lines of You know, anyone can steer the ship. But you know, only only a captain can like chart its navigation, right? And it's this idea but, but this idea of, you have to know where you're going and in order to know where you're going, you have to kind of know the lay of the land, you have to know where you are in order to know where to go from here. Yeah, I mean, tell us a story about these two, these two captains were trying to reach reached the South Pole first. And one took all the time in the world to plan it and like learn about you know, learn from Eskimos about how to dress appropriately for the weather and the other person didn't care it was just like, I'm just gonna go for it. I know enough I've I've done enough and you know, felt like he could just rely on his his intuition with that and, and one of them made it and the other team unfortunately died. And so this can be life or death in some situations of that idea of like figuring out the foundation and going From there, yeah,

Jessica Curdi 5:00

well, one of the reasons I really like e-commerce is that it is not life or death. But

William Harris 5:08

you mentioned that there are digital agencies that know what they're doing and those that don't and finding the right agency, how did you go about figuring out? If an agency, you know, the RFP process, there's so much that can go into this and figuring out whether somebody does or doesn't? How did you determine how you find the right agency through that? Yeah,

Jessica Curdi 5:28

I mean, there's, I mean, that's absolutely one of the, you know, one of the important parts of understanding, like during the RFP process, I think that there's a lot of different variables that we're looking at in terms of when we're comparing the different agencies. It's a small world, so word of mouth is absolutely like kind of the number one, like, you know, who have you worked with, like, you reach out to your network, and you get some, some great agencies. But the thing is, to your point, like, not every agency is good for every company, everyone has to kind of their sweet spot. So understanding if they have experience with businesses that are at your stage of maturity, or at your size, I think that's like really basic, just talking like kind of marketing philosophy, they how do you approach creative? How do you approach, you know, campaign structure? It helps when, you know, it helps when you know what the right answers are, or what the answers you're looking for are. But you know, just kind of understand, then, of course, there's always like, you know, there's a personality fit, there's a, an expectation, some people want to hire an agency and let them do everything some people want to get really hands on and be, you know, really involved. So making sure that all those kinds of values aligned are kind of what I would. Those are, that's what I would look for. Yeah. Yeah,

William Harris 6:40

I like that. You also talked about SMS. And you talked about bringing in, you know, better SMS and email, better retention, when you were digging into things was a retention issue for this brand, before you guys got into this.

Jessica Curdi 6:55

So it wasn't actually so I would say, so one of the cool things about Starbucks and as a brand was that it actually had a really, really great retention, the people who discovered sharp act and use the product, because the I mean, the products are really great. I will say, you know, I'm usually for them still, I don't work for them anymore. But the product, the products are great. And it actually did, we had a really strong retention. What happens though, is that when you start acquiring at like that exponential rate, you're not acquiring the same types of customers. And so it absolutely would, you know, follow logic that your retention rate would go down, what we're able to do is acquire customers at a, you know, a much faster clip than we were doing before, but actually maintain and actually and improve our already strong retention rate. So those, that's what I would say, like, you know, that's kind of the pride that I have on that side of it. And then, you know, we introduced SMS, it was a brand new channel to the to the platform talking couple years ago, when SMS is still relatively new. But what we saw is it really helped us just break through the noise, especially at some really like key key moments that are tricky, like, you know, black, like Black Friday, like Holiday Inn absolutely helped in breaking through.

William Harris 8:10

Yeah, and I think what you said there that the concept of Sure, maybe SMS isn't as new now, but there are always concepts of how are you building up that retention. And to your point, when you start acquiring customers significantly faster than you had been before a lot of people like to rely on on historical data. And so you say, well, here's what my LTV is, here's what my CAC is. And so we're good as long as we do this. But as soon as you start acquiring people at 234 times the rate that you were before, all of a sudden, the flip side happens on the on the LTV and things start dropping off. And so being able to figure out how you grow while also still maintaining that that is, that's an impressive feat. And I think to your point, being able to use new tactics, new tools, that helps, but also just the right mindset. And I think you were talking to me before when we talked about this is just like, the creative strategy that goes into it. So whether this is on the acquisition side, or on the the, you know, retention side, the thought processes going on in that, that back and forth between brand versus performance.

Jessica Curdi 9:08

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I think there's always this kind of, you know, from on the brand side, there's always this storytelling, we want to we want to say you know, big messages about the brand. But then on the performance, consumers are really looking for they're looking for benefits, they're looking for results, especially within the beauty space. It's just, it's so important. So finding that balance was was really critical for us and we did a lot of testing we came up with a lot of different types of creative and you know, height with, you know, more high level messaging, more detailed messaging, trying you know, all different formats carousels and, you know, it was just so many it was just like, really, it's, it sounds sloppy, but I really want one thing that I find that really works, we just throw a lot at the wall and just, let's see what works like you're not going to know until you try it. And what I've seen working in one place doesn't work in another place. What I've seen work six months ago doesn't work anymore. What I see work for one objective doesn't work for another objective. So know that and I will just make a caveat to that is that that's a strategy that really works, if you do the work afterwards to do the analysis to really understand so that you can act on all these learnings that you're getting, because I think that's also a kind of a whole in a lot of in a lot of marketing strategies, like, Okay, we did all this stuff. Now what, what, what's next, you know, like, how do we how do we go from here? So I think that strategies really worked for me, because I do have, you know, I do have experience, I do have the kind of analytical background that that helps evaluate?

William Harris 10:47

Well, I've had enough conversations with you over the past year to know that I don't think that it was anything but sloppy, the word that you use to describe it, it was very calculated, but to your point, testing a lot of different things, even testing against things that you already are pretty sure is not the right thing, because it might be the right thing in this situation. Because just because you just proved it another company or another business, or even another department, whatever, doesn't mean that it's not going to perform here. It's going into that with that mindset. And knowing how to analyze it, I think is the key. But having lots of those tests, we run into this all the time at our agency where, you know, they'll say great, the other agency tests, a whole bunch of stuff. And it's like, Well, what did you learn from it? It's like, I don't know, like, I don't know if this worked or not worked. You know, they said that it didn't so they turn it off. But there's no analysis to point back to to say this did or did not work. And here's why. And here's what we know. And what's this even statistically significant or not, not that everything has to get to that point in certain businesses, but some idea of some kind of statistical analysis. And you and I were nerding out over a couple of statistical analyses that I like to look at that you said you have a good one to Bayes theorem is one of them. But the one that you and I both kind of relied on was Simpsons paradox, a really good illustration that you had on Simpsons paradox. I'll take me through this.

Jessica Curdi 12:06

Yeah. So we, you know, this is actually happening in real time, this is something that we're like we're dealing with right now in my in my in my current role. So we are, we're very, you know, we just launched a couple months ago. So we're really in that learning phase of throwing things against the wall. And there's just one asset, like, that's just killing it. On meta, just blowing exploded, our budget is bloated, but it's also delivering the results it's doing. It's doing everything we want it we want it to do. But that says we don't do just one thing within meta, right? We're driving traffic to our website, we're trying to drive conversion, we're driving, driving traffic to our retail partner, we're driving, we're trying to build brand awareness. So we're doing a lot of different things within our metro strategy right now. And so this one asset, while it is like overall, if you just look at it, it's it's outperforming basically everything else, when we start digging into the different types of objectives, you know, is specifically, as an example, our retail partner campaign, the driving traffic to them, it's a completely different asset that's performing. One was static, the other was video. One was, you know, social proof. One was like brand messaging, what it had everything about it was different. But it absolutely in that campaign for that objective, it absolutely worked. And so, you know, to, you know, kind of to the point of what's Simpsons paradox, it's like, yeah, if you look at the whole, you know, you look at the whole account, you see one result, you start digging in, and you start seeing really a lot of nuance. Yeah,

William Harris 13:37

yeah. And if anybody's listening in, they're not familiar with Simpsons paradox, I do have a really good article about this on element website, which we can link to in the show notes. But, you know, to make this the simplest way I could probably explain audibly versus being able to have the visuals here would be, you know, the idea is, if you're segmenting things, you could see something in aggregate that is beating across everything. But as soon as you look at what we would call, like lurking variables, the things that are underneath there, which could be demographics, campaigns, whatever this might be, you might find that a different ad is outperforming every single one of those, even when you look at the aggregate is this other one. And so you can be tempted to say, Great, let's only run that one. Let's turn off all these other ones, even though those other ones might actually be getting the result that you want. And so you have to be careful about making aggregate analyses and extrapolating that out to just everything else.

Jessica Curdi 14:25

Yeah. Great.

William Harris 14:29

Yes. So you also talked about one of the biggest challenges that you ran into, not just at stroke victim, but just in general would be how to educate non digital colleagues and leadership, about the things that are going on in the digital world, especially with a lot of changes. What have you found to be tips or tricks that have made you successful in making those kinds of communications? Yeah,

Jessica Curdi 14:53

I would say it's hard and I can't say that I've completely completely nailed this. But I would say just a couple a couple of things. It's really honing in on like, basic messaging, right? Like, absolutely starting to throw around CAC, and LTV and ROIs. And click they're starting to throw out there again, absolutely just isn't a winning strategy in this in this one, it just overwhelms people, it doesn't influence at all. But really trying to like take any, anything that we've learned and distill it into like one or two key things to explain, like, why we're going a certain way, and building that trust. And eventually, like, those people are generally not going to become digital marketing experts. That's why they hired me. That's why That's why I'm here to be the Digital Marketer. But it's really about just building that trust, giving the data being really transparent. But in a way that's like very digestible, that kind of helps build those relationships and there for just like, you know, allows that trust to grow, and then you can keep doing what you got to keep doing. But yeah, yeah,

William Harris 15:58

one of the ones that I know you and I were talking about that can be sometimes hard is that idea of, let's just say CAC to LTV ratios, even specific for creative, right. So when you're looking at it, not just by channel but even getting into the granularities of of the individual creatives as well. What are some ways that you have found that helped describe CAC to LTV ratios or something along those lines? To the higher ups that helps them make sense to them?

Jessica Curdi 16:30

Yeah, that's, that's a great question. Just an example that, like that comes to mind is like, you know, and again, this goes back to Starbucks, I have a lot of examples from those days. But it's it was it's a very product based strategy that we had. So like, every ad was about the product, more or less. So when we're like launching a new product, that was at a lower price point than our, you know, general portfolio was actually really successful in driving consumers at a proficient CAC, especially like, within like, kind of a our non core base that we were trying to trying to attack. So that kind of the initial, the initial story is like, look, we're driving so much acquisition around this one product, this is a great story. Once you start falling that through to like, you know, three months, six months, follow a longer timeline, we saw that, like, it was harder to keep to retain those customers than it was other customers. And we saw that the LTV wasn't necessarily there. So you know, what does that mean? It's like, okay, yeah, I know, we said that this is this product really worked, it did what it was supposed to do, and this, but then this is not like a winning strategy go forward. Because we're not going to, we're not going to see the we're not going to maintain the same LTV that we're with that we've maintained otherwise. And we should look for another way to talk to those consumers. So again, it is it's, it's it's so much art and science, like it's such a it's such a balance. So just being again, I was it's being really upfront about, you know, the results and being really transparent. And then just like, like falling through, and just like keeping, keeping everyone in the loop. Like it's just people people feel better when they know what's going on. It's absolutely true. So, yeah,

William Harris 18:11

it's a science game, but it's a people game, right? And being able to have that. Have you ever seen those shapes? Where if you look at it, from one perspective, it looks like a triangle, and then you turn it and it's looks like a square, then you turn it again, and it looks like a circle? It's like, really interesting shapes? Have you ever seen these?

Jessica Curdi 18:26

I don't think I have, okay, they're wild, I

William Harris 18:30

need to send you a link after. But yeah. And so the way that I like to think about this, even from like customer acquisition is that it can look like the right customer. But that's just because of the, you're looking at it from a row as perspective or a CAC perspective. But you need more than one dimension to understand if it really is. And so if you're only looking at it two dimensional, I'm just gonna miss this. And so to your point, even when we talked about CAC, to LTV, a lot of times, I see a lot of agencies that will say, Well, I'm getting the right row as or I'm getting the right CAC. But that doesn't mean that it's the right customer. And to your point, even within the individual creatives, what we've seen is a lot of people will say this creative is outperforming the other creatives in our account, because it's getting a lower CAC. But if you actually take that same creative and you look at that over the course of three months, six months, 12 months, you might find that it did a better job of acquiring those customers, but at a sacrifice to LTV. And so then you have to start saying wait a minute, because we're acquiring people at a better CAC or a better rose doesn't mean that it's better for the business. And that's a really hard thing for a lot of, let's just say digital marketers to get behind because they're so used to well, this is what Facebook or meta is telling me, this is what you know, Google is telling me so yes, it's good. Yeah,

Jessica Curdi 19:39

absolutely. And I think kind of just to add to that, it almost it also kind of falls through after the acquisition part because, you know, in that example that I just gave, like, yeah, we're not seeing the the retention rate of that customer. So one is that we should try to look for a different customer, but the other the other the other side of that coin is like how should we be talking to a customer differently to key eat them. And then maybe instead there's, you know, maybe there's areas of opportunity within our retention program to speak to them a different way or to introduce them to different products that they might be more inclined to stick to. So, yeah, is there's a lot of moving parts. That's a really good point.

William Harris 20:20

One of the things you were dying were talking about, was this this cataclysmic moment. And I feel like, while we've talked about this a lot before, there was a moment where your job changed significantly. And the date that you called out is April, April 26 2021. Because it's shifting? To me. Absolutely. Um, you know, tell me about this date, what happened, why and how you've adjusted your approach? Yeah,

Jessica Curdi 20:47

well, yeah, this is the date, what was the release of iOS 14.5, it was a disaster for digital marketers everywhere. The change of, of tracking, and the initial, it's interesting, because we saw a really like, a noticeable dip in our performance almost immediately. And then we continued to see the decline for about four months, if I remember correctly, like it took, it was like a slow climb down. And it was just like getting more and more horrifying as we as we went. And it was, it was hard to kind of it was hard to swallow, because like, you know, up until then, it was just, there was almost, it was a little bit more formulaic, I would almost say like, it was really easy, like, putting in $1 Here, I know what I'm gonna get out, it was just a little bit more, you know, clear, let's say, the big thing that I think helped me kind of cope in the new in the new reality was bringing on multi touch attribution into into the, into the mix. So we worked with a fantastic partner tool that that that we that I love there phospho, I don't know, I don't know if I'm allowed to call call

William Harris 21:56

him cops. Anybody who wants here,

Jessica Curdi 21:58

they're a fantastic partner, I loved working with them. And, you know, we spoke to a bunch of different vendors for MTA MTA modeling, but you know, we, they were the right one for us. And it really helped us just understand how our investment was impacting not just again, not just at the last clip, but at the multi touch. So what we saw and it really opened, you know, it opened up our world and a lot of different ways, because we saw there were certain campaigns that were absolutely not driving the last click, were absolutely imperative in the in the beginning of the customer journey. We saw channels like Pinterest. Pinterest was never like, you know, it's one of those channels like it does. Okay, you know, should we do it to not do it? I don't know. But we actually saw that Pinterest was like a great performer when we looked at the whole customer journey. And we actually, and not only that, which was like kind of a weird, I mean, this is very specific. But like we had both performance and brand, Pinterest campaigns running. And it was the brand campaigns that drove the better row as when you looked at it at the customer journey. So there's just so much you can learn about, you know, about what's actually performing when you start looking at it, like more holistically. I know J four offers a lot of that. A lot of that now. Probably not as as sophisticated as a as a vendor. But that was absolutely I think the thing, the one thing that really helped us like manage this like this changing time. Yeah.

William Harris 23:28

And I think that was an imperative. Let's just say while it was a difficult date for digital marketers. I also liked it because it was unnecessary shakeup to come back to science, because to your point, it kind of almost became formulaic and easy. And it was like, this weeded out a whole lot of people who didn't understand the science, and brought the people who did understand the science to say, Okay, how do we do this in a better way? And so it was difficult time. I think it was a net positive for our space in that respect.

Jessica Curdi 23:59

I love your optimism.

William Harris 24:04

That's fair. You know, the MTA I think was was really good. And I think along those same lines, one of the ways that we handled that was we just went back to what are the observable facts? Facts that are that are actually taking place are How much did you spend facts that are absolutely taking place, or how much revenue went into the bank account. And so we can ignore, let's just say all attribution for a moment to and simply say, if we double spend here, what actually happens to the bank account, and this works in smaller businesses, this works in areas where a doubling and spend, you know, if you're, if you doubled your Tiktok spend and it was only $10,000 a month, all you're probably not going to see enough of a difference, right? But this worked in certain areas where if you did that you can kind of get back to just essentially seeing the the actual facts. And so this was an analogue to basically saying, well, let's just do hold up tests. We do a geo holdout test and actually find the actual incremental difference. I think that allowed us to dial in whether or not we can even trust the MTA. Because I think that there's even sometimes question about why is the MTA accurate or not? Yeah,

Jessica Curdi 25:10

no, that's, that's a, that's a really great point. And I think that we definitely, we definitely ask those questions ourselves, like, how do we know? We know that what we're getting out of this is actually true. But then it's like, yes, over to overtime use the results are the results are in the bank account? So it does, it did or at least it didn't, it didn't work for us. So that was, you know, a good sign.

William Harris 25:29

Yeah, there was another thing that you were talking about. Now, I think the brand that you're building right now is the rudest. Right? Yeah. And if I remember correctly, you're saying you guys moved from $0 to essentially several $100,000 A month over the course of like the first three months, which is very, very fast. Tell me a little bit about the plan and how you pull that off. Yeah, so

Jessica Curdi 25:56

there's a lot of learnings we just, we, we launched in in January, on sephora.com. And on our own website, and then we've been in store at Sephora since the end of February. It's been a really, it's been a it's been a roller coaster. And it's really fun to be working on kind of this more of a startup environment. And so going from zero to like several $100,000 in spend, is there's there's significant challenges. The first I would say is just like really administrative, like, it sounds kind of dumb, but like when you didn't exist a month ago, nobody's giving you a credit line, like, you know, like, there's, nobody's gonna and so we actually had a lot of like, turning, you know, things getting shut on and off. Because like, we ran out of budget here, we ran out of budget there. And it was just, I mean, it's again, it's so silly and minor to think about it. But these are the I would never would have thought about that going into it. Like it was just like, you know, let's just go for it. Let's, you know, we want to make we want to come out of the, you know, the gate swinging, so let's do it. But there was absolutely some challenges with that. We launched like channel by channel, like every, like every two weeks. So we started with with metta just really driving a lot of traffic we had obviously there's no, we didn't have any like consumer data yet to like feed into the algorithm, right. So we were really just like, Let's drive traffic, like let's hone in on, you know, what we think our core target audience is, and drive them to the website so that they can start learning about the brand. We did some also like a little bit more like upper funnel investment as well. And then we launched tic toc two weeks later, we're very much into the hair talk space, we have a lots of gorgeous girls with gorgeous hair and using our product and really loving it. So it's been a great, a great way for us to kind of, again, more on an upper funnel. Although we did test, like we've tested a bird to lower funnel on basically all of these different channels with different performance Tiktok for us is absolutely an upper funnel channel. And then then a couple of weeks after that we launched Google with you know, brand, non brand performance Max, just everything out of the gate. Yeah, and and a lot of learnings from from from that. And I think one of my core learnings I would say is just like, Go starting from zero is not the same as a mature brand. And I know that like yes, that's like very logical, but a lot of the assumptions that i i personally made like building out, you know, a marketing mix model, which is like my favorite thing to do. And just like trying to understand, like, forecast how we're going to perform, and you know, what we're what we can expect, even with all my assumptions of like, okay, we're starting at zero, and you know, we're not going to have the same benchmarks as a existing brand. Even those are just like kind of up ended, and, you know, throw them all out. Basically, I was like, I have no idea what's gonna happen, right? It's a brand new company, you have no idea how people are going to take it. So from there, it's like, okay, how do you pivot? And how do you pivot fast? And that's kind of where we're right where we are right now. It's just like, you know, just moving all the different pieces to try and try to build the best board. Yeah,

William Harris 28:54

I love when people ask for a plan, let's just say like, perspectives, right? Over three years, or something like that. And you like, the reality like, these are brands that are, you know, more or less, maybe not completely getting started, but maybe they're only doing 5 million 10 million a year. And it's like, well, this is assuming that you grow 100% The plan is to grow 100% This year, the plan is to grow another 100% Next year, it's like there's so many things that could change whatever that that happens, this three year plan that's happening out here is is completely just made up magical numbers. There's no way that we can even know if this is accurate or not.

Jessica Curdi 29:27

There's a lot of magic, but there's a lot of I mean, it's there's a lot of logic as well as like, especially when, you know, like when you start seeing a lot of business like you can start you can make some you know, broad, you know, barring like gross economic downturns or something like that. You can start making some some smart assumptions for sure.

William Harris 29:43

Yeah, like mass pandemonium, things happen all the time. It seems like the last few years. So what you know, you said that's one of the things that surprised you. What's one of the things that surprised you in a good way where you're like, Oh, I didn't expect that. Oh, here we are three months, four months in, and this is doing significantly better than I would have anticipated.

Jessica Curdi 30:08

I don't know what it says that I can't think of anything. I'm no different. Yeah, yeah, I think what I would say is just the, we are actually driving like a ton of traffic, right, like we've been able to drive up a lot of traffic to, to our brand partner, we've been to our retail partner, we've been able to drive a lot of traffic to our own website. And, you know, that's part of building brand awareness when you're at, you know, at zero. So I think the ability to do that and more efficiently than I had anticipated, I think was like kind of a really big win for us in these first couple of months. So I'm happy about that. And

William Harris 30:45

I like hearing that you guys are doing that. Because I feel like a lot of times people still downplay brand awareness and traffic campaigns, at least in the DTC space it gets, I don't know people, people get crazy, we still very much appreciate them and encourage them the necessary necessity of them, not just in the beginning, but even ongoing throughout the lifecycle of your business. Because there's still different roles in which those play, even just from the idea of like the CPM on a reach campaign versus the CPM on a purchase campaign. They're massively different. And sometimes the goal is you just need to reach more people. And then that can begin to fill in your conversion campaigns. And so yeah,

Jessica Curdi 31:27

that was kind of our strategy is like, Okay, we know it's going to take more than one ad to get people to buy our products, like, Let's get them to the website. So we can get them into a retargeting pool and send them another 234 ads afterwards. So and then finally, they will convert but that, you know, that type of building that kind of frequency takes time and building, building the right campaigns takes time and learning the learning takes time. So three months in, we've got a lot of learnings, but we still got definitely a lot more to go.

William Harris 31:52

Yeah. Is there is there one key thing that you would take away from this, that you would say, in the next time that I take somebody from zero to $200,000 a month and spend this is the one thing that I want to make sure that I put together in my plan ahead of time.

Jessica Curdi 32:12

I mean, like the making sure we have the money like flowing literally, I mean, it was really one of our biggest challenges. And then I think just having having just was it with experience, right like having the better benchmarks, just having the right expectations. And a big you know, a big part of driving traffic. In addition to building our our retargeting poles is also about building our email list and like finding other ways that are non paid of community, like keeping up the communication with people. So finding maybe more aggressive ways of building that list from the very beginning. I think that would be those would be like two, two points of action.

William Harris 32:54

I like that. I know, one of the other things that you really like, is just overall attribution discussions. It's something that you and I have have geeked out over. How do you approach understanding if the traffic and awareness you're driving towards Sephora, as opposed to your own DTC website is worth it?

Jessica Curdi 33:19

That is a great question. Because I really think it depends who you ask. If you ask me, I'm gonna feel I have a very different answer than probably what our sales team would say. But I think what, once you start having like a significant or more sophisticated look at attribution, I don't, I wouldn't say that I have this data right now. Like that is something you know, I'd love to have, but I don't think I have it. Once you start seeing once you do have kind of maybe more sophisticated tools or whatever those campaigns that are, you're driving to Sephora, they're part of your, your, they're going to be part of your you know, total attribution, you know, experience so you can absolutely see like the kind of Halo that any type of ad is going to perform, even if it's not driving to your own website. I mean, that's really the point of a brand awareness campaign overall, like we all know that like a meta brand awareness campaign has a click through rate of like negative zero, it's like you're gonna have like no traffic is gonna come out of that but the investment is there and the investment does something and we know that so I think it has a very, like very similar to driving traffic to anywhere else. But yeah, yeah, yeah,

William Harris 34:32

I think your point the data is not there. It's too early to tell one of the things that I know that we like to do in situations like that when a brand is all of a sudden that hey, they just landed in Target or Sephora or wherever is getting those sales reports and we even will run holdout tests for them as well too and says like, okay, great. We're gonna run the brand awareness campaign now in these videos, but not in these videos because I want to see what the storyboards actually say different here as well. And I think to your point like that overall MTA it plays out not just to the Good to see sight but it plays out in the stores and being able to do whatever you can to assess whether or not it's driving actual real conversions there over the longer period of time, I think makes a big difference.

Jessica Curdi 35:12

Yeah, that's actually it's interesting. You brought it up, because it's something that's been top of mind recently. And I was just like, Should we start thinking about delivering ads that drive to store like, you know, forget about sephora.com? Forget about, I was, like, Let's drive people like through a door. But then it's like, you know, there's trade offs, right? Like, we're, we are still a small, small brand with a small budget. So it's like, where do we not spend in order to do that test or to do that? And those are hard questions. And, you know, I don't I don't, you know, I still haven't been convinced that that would be the right right way for us to know. But it's only something like to think about, it's like every month ask question, Should we try this? You know, is it better tip to drive people to the store? Is it better to, you know, drive people to sign up for email, rather than make the conversion today? Like the old days? These are all trade offs, especially when your budgets are still still on the lower side? Yeah,

William Harris 35:59

like you said, they're all trade offs. And I think to your point that you made earlier, with all of the different testing, the key is just, are you going to learn something from it? And so it's okay to do the test. But as long as you set it up in a way that you can actually learn from it. And you say, yeah, it's definitively better or is definitively not better. Yeah. Still a good learning experience.

Jessica Curdi 36:19

Absolutely. Yeah. And it doesn't always happen. But that's, that's the goal. Right? Yeah.

William Harris 36:26

I understand you guys also recently acquired, Amari, from your perspective, as somebody who's going to, you know, run ads for some of the companies that you guys acquire, what is the thing that excites you about working on an acquisition as opposed to working on a startup?

Jessica Curdi 36:43

Um, so this this company in particular, I find it just to be really interesting. For a lot of reasons. It's. So first MRI is a supplement company that specializes in mental mental wellness, and the connection of the gut brain access. So it's a really different business overall. Yes, it's CPG. Yes, it's DTC. Yes, it's, it's all those things, but it's a different product. So it's a different way of talking about it. And, you know, just having a different objective, you know, we're not worried about like the look of your skin, we're talking about your mental wellness. And that's, that's something that's like, a little bit deeper. So that from that perspective, it's super interesting. And then also just the model of of the business it is, it's an MLM business. So it's complete it is that like, a very different model. So I'm excited to jump in, this is a very new, you know, a new acquisition for us. So I'm excited to jump in and start, like, understanding the different this business model, but also just like how we can build, you know, build the business within like a very different set of constraints.

William Harris 37:46

Yeah, I like that. We've covered a lot of topics, a lot of ground, I want to get into the personal side of who is Jessica kurta. But before we do, what other advice or tips would you like to give to people who are looking at this that we maybe didn't cover that I didn't ask?

Jessica Curdi 38:06

Oh, gosh, that's a great question. Um, you know, I think I am, this, I probably sound like a broken record, because we kind of just cover it, but like, I would just like, really emphasize the analytics, which is, like, understand, like spending money or spending time doing anything, and then not really understanding how you're going to measure it, like having hypotheses before running tests, like, like, having that kind of structure is like, absolutely important. And if you don't, if you don't have it, you're, I don't wanna say you're wasting money. But you're, you're definitely not using your your budgets like to the to the to their best. So if you don't really know, if you're in digital marketing, and you're not an analyst, not everybody is like, I think finding finding a partner, finding somebody who is able to, like provide that data for you or provide those insights is just, it's just absolutely imperative.

William Harris 39:02

Yeah, I love that you went with a reiteration instead of something new in the reason why is because that leads very well into the first question that I wanted to ask you about, when we get into the personal side of who is Jessica Kirti. She, from what I understand, you did not have the same normal bedtime stories that everybody else did. And so this will make sense on why you went for your default of getting back into the analytics. Tell me about the bedtime stories you had as a kid?

Jessica Curdi 39:29

Yeah. So I mean, I did have, I did have some bedtime stories, of course, but like my, my father, my dad is, he's a computer developer, software developer. And I definitely get my math brain from his side of the family. And so eight years old, rather than, you know, reading stories, although we do like we both are avid readers, so we'd read together too. He would sit next to me in bed and teach me algebra at eight years old. So that was, that was my foray into higher level mathematics.

William Harris 40:00

I mean, that's fantastic though. Again, that explains why it's like well, obviously there's maybe some genetic component to I don't know where the the line is genetics for people being able to understand math but it's like okay, your dad has a math brain there's a good chance that you probably have a math brain as well but being told about algebra at eight as you go to bed um, that's, I don't know that I've heard anybody else that does it, but makes sense on why you would immediately go to like, analytics this is yeah,

Jessica Curdi 40:23

and I think the flip side of that too is not only was he teaching it I was excited to learn and I think there's a very exciting to learn about

William Harris 40:32

that's very true. What about books and podcasts? I always like to ask people about this when I asked you about this you're like yeah, I have some pretty strong opinions about you know, literary stuff. What are these strong opinions that you hold about literary elements

Jessica Curdi 40:47

i Although I am like by no means like a you know an English literature connoisseur by any by any stretch of the imagination I am a little bit of a snob I guess in my in my tastes and my I tend to like 18th century like French and Russian literature. I write and just like to illustrate my my snobby doubts, I guess, or my, my ambition, let's say, after my my daughter, my first child, my daughter was born. I decided the best thing to do for sunlight reading was to pick up one piece. Sure, like reading, bedtime reading while while the while the baby naps. Granted, it took me here to get through. It took me a long time I didn't have I did not have a lot of time as a new mom. But that was definitely my my ambition. And it worked out well, because I got the name of my son from that book. So like.

William Harris 41:39

Very cool. Do you mind sharing that? His

Jessica Curdi 41:42

name was Anatole. So there was a prince Anatole in the yeah, my little fairy. Cool. That

William Harris 41:48

is that is like you said the, the not snappiness or whatever. But like, Oh, you're just reading this silly little American classic. Let me let me get into some really deep stuff here. Yeah. What other books do you like to read? Then? I.

Jessica Curdi 42:02

So I do read like, I do like to read mostly fiction. And it's I don't have patience for nonfiction or biographies. I don't know why. It's just not my money. But my my all time here, which is like a complete departure from what everything I just told you about literature is it's a it's a peek into my more nerdy side is my favorite book of all time, this Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I read. I don't know, maybe probably 10 times at this point. And I'm probably about time for a rewrite at this point. It's been a while but I love that book.

William Harris 42:32

Yeah. Universe. Right. So what's the answer to the universe? Right? Isn't that in that from that one? Yeah, it's 40 to 40, obviously, I mean, I should have known that.

Jessica Curdi 42:44

Right. So the question is, what's the question? Yeah, right.

William Harris 42:47

Okay. So I have one more question for you about numbers here. Very, this is off the cuff here. But I just want to see if it plays out there, if I was gonna ask you to pick a random number, the most random number that you could think of between one and 100. So the number that is not your favorite number, right? Like, I don't want to pick your favorite number, or like the number that you had, and, you know, sports or something, but like the number that you're like, nobody else would pick this. This is the most random number that I could think of between one and 100. What number would you pick? 27? Oh, okay. That's interesting. That's close. Apparently, the number one there is, this was on a Veritasium video, where the the number one answer that people pick, typically, and that is 37. And the second most picked number is 73. That it was like nobody would pick these numbers. And yet, that is the number that most people pick. So you got it with the seven and seven being one of the ones that are considered to be the most random.

Jessica Curdi 43:42

Interesting. I I'm really curious what the psychology behind that is.

William Harris 43:46

It is good. I won't go into it here. Watch the Veritasium video. But it is it is very interesting. So you're close there, but you know, okay, 42 Maybe it's not 42? Maybe the answer is 37. May have been? What about? I understand that you'd like to travel a lot. And you had a really interesting trip to Costa Rica. But any fun stories from traveling here that you'd want to share? Um,

Jessica Curdi 44:11

yeah, I've had some I've had some really good trips. COSTA we did a two week, a two week road trip across Costa Rica. So that was really just like a wonderful experience. It was my first and only foray into surfing. Which is if you're gonna do it, do it in Costa Rica. There's not a better place. I was not good at it. I was not good at it. But I tried to come check it off the bucket list. We also did a week drive through Kenya as like as a safari which was just really really incredible. Just seeing all the animals and we had this wonderful guide His name was George he was awesome. And he you know, we were of course excited. We went there. We were excited to see the lions and like, you know, the zebras and the giraffes everything. This guy had a pet One for birds that was just so contagious that by the end of the trip, I was like, oh my god, did you see that? What did you like the birds were just the highlight of the trip. And it was really just like actually wonderful to see somebody who was like, clearly just so happy to share his passion. And we don't want to pull birds here in Texas. So I'm always on the lookout now to so

William Harris 45:23

I actually heard them chirping a little bit there, which was very peaceful. It was very nice. Yeah, who knew that you were gonna go to Africa to become an ornithologist? Never know. Right? I also know we were talking about this before, which is your favorite city that you've lived in? Because you've lived in New York City, Paris, Montreal, Dallas. I mean, you've seen a whole lot of different places. Which one's your favorite? And why?

Jessica Curdi 45:50

Oh, gosh, I I will always live for Paris. I am such a it's such such like a cliche American. That I just I've been dreaming about I was dreaming about Paris since I was a you know, since I was a kid. And then I finally had a chance to to go, which is again, how I met your brother. So. And it's just It's my absolute favorite city in the world. Just there's something magical about the light. They're walking there. The street, everything is just so much more charming.

William Harris 46:20

So tell me a story about Mike. Let's just get a story out here for all the world to hear. Oh, gosh,

Jessica Curdi 46:27

well, I'm gonna pick it. I'll pick something, Tim. But

William Harris 46:31

if you choose not to, but I guess

Jessica Curdi 46:35

I'm telling your mother on it. But no, I mean, the first the first day that I met Mike actually, so we had been. So we went to business school in Paris together, that's how we know each other. And we've been in touch with a few months prior just like over, you know, chat or whatever emails and getting to know each other, which was cool, because we were to have maybe five Americans and the whole school. So like we were, we were, we were exotic over there. And and we were supposed to actually fly to Paris together. He was coming from Ohio and he was going to meet me in New York and we're gonna fly over to Paris together. And he missed his flight. His flight was delayed and so he missed our connection. So it was not his fault. And then so we finally regrouped at school at our dorm we finally met in person at which time we proceeded to get lost trying to find our campus we're at the dorm trying to get campus could not find it just walked around the entire city looking looking for it. And then we're just so exhausted and so jetlag that we were just like, ripping each other adjustment and we were just like, like, we could not like we could not stand it. And then we're just like butter sandwiches, went back to our rooms had a good night's sleep and like been best friends ever since. But yeah, he it was it was it was great. Yeah,

William Harris 47:53

so wait a minute. You guys were in France. Yeah. Trying to find your campus. Did you either have you speak French? Like did you like do you speak other languages?

Jessica Curdi 48:02

I speak French now. I did not speak French when I moved there. I had you know, years of French education. French language education from you know, our very prestigious American American language of school so I did not speak French when we got there. And to the point where I was actually at the at the airport just landed in Paris ready to move here. And with all of my suitcases because I was not a light Packer. And I could not find I could I couldn't figure out how to ask for help. I just couldn't like I have all these luxuries. I don't know where to go. I can't pick anything up these luggage is way more than me. I don't know how to ask anybody for all but I was just like, oh, how what am I doing? How am I gonna figure this out? I after a couple years, couple years in Paris a couple years in Montreal. I had to learn French.

William Harris 48:51

French in Russian right? I believe you said you know Russian Yeah, well,

Jessica Curdi 48:54

yeah, I'm um, my parents are from Russia. My whole family. I'm the first person my family born in the US so I unfortunately don't speak Russian very well. Which is such a shame but I understand that so. Yeah.

William Harris 49:06

So So should I say Sivan? Or should I say Cacciola Jessica Curdi 49:12

you can say either

William Harris 49:19

way but don't go too fast for me. I'm not that good. What about show and tell? I always like to see if anybody has anything in their their office or anything that they'd like to show off and tell about anything that you have to show until oh,

Jessica Curdi 49:33

gosh, okay, I yeah, I can show a thing. But so you know, most people have like to do lists. Okay, this is my this is my to do pile. So I like to keep it within you know, within I my my eyeline so that I can really stress myself out about everything I'm not accomplishing. But just I can hold that I'll put it down and I can just demonstrate a little bit of it. Um, I have several books to read, including some F Scott Fitzgerald, and a book about fonts. You know,

William Harris 50:10

everybody should have a book about fonts. So okay, I will say we did. We did like a what was it? Like? When you answer questions at a bar, why am I drawing a blank? Thank you. Yes. tribute it. So my wife and I didn't give you data one time. And I really bad at like normal pop trivia Which a lot of this was but then they had like the speed round for fonts. I nailed that one. I'm such a nerd. But it's okay. Fonts. I like it. Yeah.

Jessica Curdi 50:37

And so then I have one Vogue magazine just to really show my my spectrum of my personality. I love it. jigsaw puzzle, or rainbow jigsaw puzzle. And my, like I said, my it's this is it's a it's an atrocious guy. It's from, it's from my childhood. It is like, I can't believe it's survived all this time. And I have all the pieces but yeah, I have my little stress inducing to do pile. Well,

William Harris 51:08

yeah. Not that you're, we've talked about this. You're a new mom, fairly new mom, and you've got two young kids. So not that you don't have anything going on in life besides your work and taking care of the kids. So you have to have all these extra things that you want to add to your list?

Jessica Curdi 51:21

Of course, of course.

William Harris 51:25

What makes you magical?

Jessica Curdi 51:28

What makes you magical? Oh, I love this question. Um, I, I can dance in almost any situation. I will find a way to dance. I might also sing but it's better if I don't sing for everybody. But I can dance in any situation.

William Harris 51:45

Any okay? I'm gonna, I'm gonna put you to the test here. Roll the barrel. We'll have a barrel of fun. Right. Okay. All right. Even with poker, we got it. This is good. This has been a lot of fun. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that I wanted to ask that I missed here. Can you think of anything else?

Jessica Curdi 52:04

I know, I don't know. I know we've covered a lot of ground. We covered a

William Harris 52:08

lot. Jessica, if if people are listening here and they want to connect with you, or work with you in some way, what's the best way for them to follow you and hear more about your thoughts and who you are?

Jessica Curdi 52:19

Yeah, I would say you can look me up on LinkedIn. Just because it is a pretty unique name. So it's basically just me out there. So you can you can find me pretty easily. That's

William Harris 52:30

awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day today to share your knowledge, your wisdom with us your personality, your dance moves all of the above.

Jessica Curdi 52:37

Thank you well so much. It was so much fun talking with you today. Yeah,

William Harris 52:41

and everybody else. Thanks for tuning in. Have a great rescue day.

Outro 52:47

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

‍