Bedfellows: How Boll & Branch Keeps Humans and AI in the Same Sheets

0:00Phillip: Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip. I'm Brian. And Brian, this is like our first time we've had you and me back in the seat in a little while. We've been all over the place. You look well rested. Oh, good. I love looking well rested. I might be going to bed late. I might be getting up early. But I'm looking well rested because I'm sleeping on Bowen Branch sheets, which were sent to me by Bowen Branch and are delightfully comfortable. Unbelievable. And I'm not just saying that it is actually the truth. This is the episode where we talk to Bull and Branch.

0:38Welcome Chief Commercial Officer Katia Unlu to the show. Hi, guys. So nice to see you, Brian. So nice to see you, Philip. I'm excited to be here and to chat all things comfort with you guys.

0:53Phillip: We're going to cover a lot today. We're going to get into, you know, you're in the process of opening five stores this summer. retail experiences, a good deal of what we're covering recently on the show. Also want to talk about the balance that you're striking between AI implementation, you know, reducing friction, keeping the human touch. But, you know, as we get into that, I'd really like to just talk a little bit about like what your role is and, you know, who you are and what you're doing at Ball & Branch. Absolutely. For those that don't know, although I want every single person to sleep on Ball & Branch sheets, we're getting there.

1:29every bed in America. We will have almost 19 stores by the end of this year, which has been such a journey. And I've actually been a part of this journey for half of its life, which has been just so rewarding for me personally and amazing. When I first started with the brand, we were 99 % e-com and we have now expanded into all of these different channels. We're in Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom across the country. And it's just been so many exciting milestones. We're in categories. We're launching travel and sleepwear and dabbling into furniture. And it's just been such an amazing journey to see now the company come to life in all of these places.

2:15So it's been incredible. My role has also expanded, honestly, as the business needed it and as the business needs change. So first, it was really focused on performance and analytics and D2C. And as we've grown all of these channels, we added retail and wholesale to the equation. And that's how my role has evolved. And it's been amazing.

2:38Phillip: There's the eras of retail, you covered it, sort of the beginning of the D2C era, right? And I know that Bowling Branch has done such a tremendous job in thought leadership and helping others in the industry understand how you've gained the success that you've had. But it's not just D2C, right? You've mentioned how now Bowling Branch has expanded beyond channels into other areas of influence. And now we're looking at all of the other retail investments. There's planning at Macy's.com. There's subscriptions. subscription boxes like Birchbox, luxury. Where I came from. Right? That was my prior background.

3:20Phillip: I know. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. I think that tells the arc also of the consumer evolution, right? There's a lot of evolution in how consumers are changing and all of the new modes in which they're purchasing and how they come to understand a brand and the relationship to a brand and how they may have a expectation of that relationship with the brand by which they discover the brand through the channel, which they have the relationship. What does that arc tell you about commerce and the consumer needs and priorities that are evolving? One of the reasons I actually came to Bull and Branch, the like fundamentals for me, especially coming from a place where Birchbox was.

4:02And I think we can all, we all kind of know the archetype. A lot of founders who came out of HBS in 2008, it was like a very special class of HBS, started a lot of amazing brands out of it. Rent the Runway, Birchbox, Warby. And they were great brands. They focused on one very singular product and they were very focused on marketing. And I think the fundamental miss in a lot of this like crop of businesses that happened was that none of them thought about the customer and creating an experience for the customer that they're going after. So all of a sudden, you know, when the VC money stopped coming, they were left with rising tax over time as as Meta and Google and all these platforms became really competitive.

5:00And they were left with a product that was kind of OK with absolutely no path to repeat purchases, never expanded beyond the hero product. And then and basically that's when the music stopped. Like some have made it out of this carnage and have like right size and figured out that path. But that was the plague of a lot of these companies. So where where this gets into like Bull and Branch, I I had all of that knowledge and background. And when I was looking for a new role, I was like, I'm going to go to a place that is has always been for sort of profitable. fundamentals are intact um a place that actually knows here's here's like amazing products that we're making for people prior i can't take any credit for what scott and missy the founders of bone branch started they they're from day one first order profitable from day one they did things differently they the sheets that brian has had the pleasure of sleeping on was took years of careful crafting.

6:08They didn't just go out and buy a sheet from a manufacturer and just like tried to sell it online to people. Missy spent like blood, sweat and tears toiling in, creating a weave until it was perfect and then went to a factory in India and asked them to make that weave. The four hours a day I spent in product meetings, that is still how we run the company. And then thinking about how are we going to bring that product to life is like an afterthought. It's not the leading thought of how we come up with the product. We make a really great product and then we figure out how we're going to get into people's hands.

6:48And I think that is like the fundamental miss of the like DTC era. And I think the other piece too, right, that you hit upon is DTC took over and everybody thought that like, oh, I'll just buy things online and like nothing else needs to happen. People thought customer experience and customer service, I mean, it's this outsourced function that lives in other countries that people don't even think or worry about. What about the experience? And that is like such a symptom of this D2S era because that's not how retailers thought. There's plenty of retailers that have high touch services, that have client telling they have all of this infrastructure built in.

7:33And it's almost like in the D2C rise, boom, people like forgot that that's an important piece of the experience.

7:41Phillip: I've gone deep down the rabbit hole over the last few months in building custom AI harnesses and skills around foundation models to make future commerce better every single day. And that started at building a vector database and then a custom harness for us to be able to search future commerce's archives and to build a skill so that whenever we do anything for any kind of text search, we're searching future commerce's archives. And all of that relies on a foundation model. But when most of us think of foundation models, we're thinking of text generation. But text generation is not what AI is by default.

8:18Phillip: Most people, when they are interacting with AI, are interacting with things that aren't primarily text. I saw a stat that one in six Google searches today are multimodal. Think about that for a second. One in six searches are a voice search or an image search or a camera search or some sort of search that's other than text entered into a box. So I think that the way that we're searching, the modes that we are expecting to be able to search with are already changing. And that means our interactions online, our expectations for the interactions online are changing too. And so the foundation models that we use for driving those AI interactions have to change as well.

9:04Phillip: And that's what makes me think about our new partner, 11 Labs, because 11 Labs is the frontier lab building the voice layer for the next generation of customer experience. Voice agents, they are the frontline. They support, they sell, They guide the answer a customer's needs, and they can get you from intent. They can get you to action, and they can do it in real time. And there are plenty of brands that are using 11 Labs infrastructure to support millions of customers. Companies like Klarna, who supports 35 million customers, and Revolut, who has deployed 11 Labs agents to resolve issues eight times faster in as much as 30 languages.

9:44Phillip: Brands from e-commerce and retail and customer operations are building on Eleven Labs voice agent infrastructure. And for commerce, I think this matters so much because the best kinds of customer experiences have always been the ones that take place in a conversation. And that kind of conversation doesn't just happen on the sales floor anymore. It can happen anywhere. And so if someone shows up in your support channel, you still want your support channel, even if it's driven by an agent, to be able to sell. And so now it finally can. Shopping, support, returns, product education, international markets, anywhere the customer has intent, but the interface is getting in the way.

10:25Phillip: That's what 11 Labs is building. It's one voice for your brand across multiple customer touch points and almost any language. And it's at real scale. So if you're thinking about what happens when customers are not typing, when they stop typing and they start talking, start thinking about 11 Labs. Build the agent, give your brand a voice and meet your customer the way that they already want to be communicated with. So go to 11labs.io slash futurecommerce. That's 11labs.io slash futurecommerce. One voice for your brand across multiple customer touch points. That's 11labs.io slash futurecommerce and tell them Phillip sent you.

11:04Phillip: Let's get back to the show. I think this is so huge. And I've heard this saying and I actually fully believe this. what you win them with is what you win them to. And I think that that sort of speaks to the product quality is like, number one, if you don't have a quality product, you can't do anything. Like eventually word of mouth is going to get around. And positive word of mouth is the most effective way to make sales, right? It's a recommendation from a trusted friend or an advisor or an expert, whatever it is. And that's like the surest way to get someone to buy your product, an outside third party voice bringing something to somebody else and sharing it with them.

11:47100%. Especially in our category, right? Like we see that really ring true. Like we are not beauty. We're not fashion. The word of mouth is like the most important thing that happens in our category. There's still a cross generational like learning that happens. a mom still shopping at Bloomingdale's for her sheets and she will tell her daughter who is registering at Zola hey this is amazing like you should put bone brand sheets on your registry like that is still very much how people people discover wow yeah the inverse of that is also true though I think if someone says oh don't get that that's actually like close to a knockoff or whatever and they're not going to buy your product.

12:36Oh yeah, that carries a tremendous,

12:38Phillip: it probably carries a lot more weight too. You probably have to hear more positive reinforcement than you have to hear one negative reinforcement. That's been studied quite a bit, right? Yeah, totally. And I think one of the things that as you're talking, I think Philip actually inadvertently said it best, Bone Branch is sort of the Taylor Swift of the Sheets group. When did I say that? you said the word eras and i think that i love it i totally didn't catch that that's so good uh what bull and branch has been able to do is enter the market in an era that was so direct to consumer it was just like okay this is how you sell now this is how we're going to build audiences and build markets and and so on and what you've done though is you've been able to say hold up there are things from the past like Americana in Taylor Swift's case or pop or whatever it is hold back on and say we can have all boys too I don't know where this is coming from this is wild I'm not even a Taylor Swift fan which is he thinks about protest too much a couple of her songs are pretty good go on that's the real truth he actually is a taylor swift yeah i was gonna say he's a closet taylor swift fan go on yeah that's the uh give us the uh all too well 10 minute version of bow and branch i want to hear what i mean the reality is this is all getting struck i just know it i like this is coming back this whole thing is i just came out as a taylor swift fan right right i'm not i'm not a taylor swift fan uh But the thing is, we're reaching back.

14:30We're kidding on things that are tried and true methods of connecting with customers. Once you have a good product, you need to be in the places where people are. And they need to experience, especially something like sheets, touching, feeling, smelling, having things in the context they'll actually be in. And I know that you've introduced a program where you actually come into someone's home and actually into a very intimate space, their bedroom, and help them style and get a feel for what they could experience with Bowen Branch products. And I think that that's just – it harkens back to a different era and maybe even surpasses it.

15:12There's not many consumer products available at a broad level that would offer up a service like this. And to come out of the era that you did and then introduce something that engages more than just, well, asynchronous purchasing patterns is, like, I think a really big step for any brand that came out of that era to continue to succeed. they will have to follow this path totally scott and missy it wasn't even in their purview like oh hey you should take a bunch of vc money and like that's how you should grow and like spend a bunch of money on meta when i came in into the brand in 2019 all a lot of our advertising was done on audio as an example like traditional like radio advertising and it was was they just like weren't even that in that world that like in my prior careers I was in the customer service number for a very long time and still to this day rings Scott's cell phone, right?

16:21Like that is like, that's how we like, that's how they just always behave. They never got like the company just never got distracted by all the ups and downs. And same with COVID. I think a lot of brands, especially in home, had an excellent COVID, right? And then not so excellent afterwards, right? Because people were in their homes and poor. Everyone was Zooming from their bedrooms, right? And we just have continued to just execute our plan, stay on track, have the fundamentals, always obsessing about product, always obsessing about the customer experience. That's just like always been true.

17:00So we just haven't had all of the ups and downs over the last even seven years that everyone's been on because we've just, that's just always been ingrained in the company.

17:11Phillip: There's interesting behavior and it's something I'll muse on. And then I guess I could sort of redirect it back to how your programs and, you know, sending stylists into customers' homes. I really want to hear more about that. But I look at my own purchasing behavior in this category and I look at how maybe there's, it's unlike, this behavior is unlike other categories where there's a bit of an irrational, I don't want to say an irrational behavior. I could buy a single set of sheets and wash them and put them on my bed, but that's not how I behave. I find something I like and I buy three or four of them.

17:56Phillip: I keep them stocked. I'll put one in the wash and I put another one on. Like there is a methodology or like a behavioral pattern that is unlike other product categories that I think is an interesting behavior. And I also, it tends to skew a lot more towards taste and fashion and trend. And I have things from, you know, from 10 years ago that I don't use as much as I'm using right now that I, but I don't think of it in that way. Right. So I tend to be influenced a lot by what I see others buying, maybe ad creative. And I'm curious what a program around something like, I think you have this stylist program.

18:49Phillip: I'm curious what others are using and looking for recommendations that might help them to enable more of this curation and purchasing behavior patterns might be able to do that helps them. Yeah, absolutely. And we, you know, that is the like replenishment angle is definitely one angle. I think sheets is such an unconsidered purchase because there's no market leader in this category, right? Most people just go to Target or go to Amazon Basics or go to Ikea and that's where they get their sheets. because I was in Costco totally because there's no brand leader in this category. And that's like the exciting part of like the opportunity that is still out there for us and others to take where there's just not a market leader because there's no brand like honestly, besides Bowling Bridge, there's no brand that thinks about building a brand and having really quality products that will stand up to time out there.

19:53So, you know, just to, you know, touch on the like, we call it the room service program, but it really goes to the fundamentals of how and why we've opened stores. We open stores for a very different reason than most, I think, D2C brands have. You know, you saw you saw this behavior coming out of COVID, all these D2C brands that were like, we're going to open up a bunch of stores and that's what's going to save us. And then basically you saw them all closing these stores a year later because it didn't work. Fundamentally, most brands think that stores are like some sort of a brand awareness channel for them.

20:29They think I'm going to plop a store in the middle of of Soho in New York City and the people, they'll just come. That's how they will discover us. It's a billboard for us. Fundamentally, that is not how we think about opening stores. Sure, over time, for sure, it's going to help drive up awareness in that market for us. Absolutely. Fundamentally, we open stores in places where our customers are because we want to build an even better relationship with them over time. And having a person in their community, in their market that understands that in Bethesda, the time that you have to be in there on the street, like this is the local charity that you have to be a part of.

21:12and like this is the community and this is like the fun stuff that happens around it. Having a person like that in that market is like everything for us because all of a sudden there's a face to a name. You can talk to somebody, you can call them, you can tell them about my daughter's graduating. It's such, this is such a milestone in my life. I have no idea what it's going to be like when she leaves my house. She's been in my house for 18 years. And it is such a journey that they're on. And we're a part of that journey with them. We're like, don't worry. One thing you can check off your list is dorm bedding.

21:50We will help you set it up for her. We will do everything. If you want us to come to college, if you want us to ship it to you, we will do whatever. We do that all the time. You move to a new house. We're like, hey, if you're interested and not all people are, right? As you guys said, it is a very intimate setting. It's a very intimate setting. I don't need, I personally don't want someone in my house to be looking at all the crap that's on my nightstand. I mean, it's a mess. Like, I don't need them seeing that stuff. But there are a lot of people that do. They're like, I don't, I don't know how to, you buy sheets.

22:26I don't know how to put them on the bed. I don't know how to style them. The other thing too, Philip that you write like part of it is the replenishment piece but what we see right is people they're like wow the sheets are amazing I've washed them a hundred times and they like better than when they did when I took them out of the package and then all of a sudden they want everything on their bed and their bathroom to be Bowling Branch they're like how about my pillows how about my Devan shirt like I want to upgrade everything in my life to be Bowling Branch and And that is what we see. And they know they some people are like, fine, oh, I'll just throw it on, whatever.

23:02But some people really want our help and support. And we do that. Absolutely. All day long. We're like, you're moving to a new house. We can take care of that for you. You already have enough on your plate. First thing you can have is probably be sleeping on a mattress because RH or Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barrel forgot, you know, the bed's delayed. So we will help you set it up like whatever you need for you. And we do that all the time. And we bring croissants. We bring flowers. Whoa. That's the fundamental pieces. We're there for our customers. We open store where our customers already are so we can get to know them better.

23:40And I think that a lot of our decision making around what programs we have in stores, what type of people we hire in stores, how we lead, what marketing activations we do in these stores all falls out of that. That's like the fundamental principle. So, so essential. I think one of the things that you're kind of hitting on, it's sort of swirling around is people might buy something they enjoy, but they will actually defend what they love. And I think this is where like having people that you can develop affection for and connection to in markets where you have strength is such an incredible play because you're actually not just trying to sell, you're trying to cultivate that sort of affection for and real connection to life.

24:32You talked about important moments in people's lives, like their child graduating, leaving their home and going to college. That's an essential piece of someone's life and I'm coming up on that relatively soon. So it's very top of mind right now. So yes, yeah, you can help me with that. I think these are the kinds of moments where if you don't have someone that you trust, you don't have product that you can trust. I think the word here is trust. Trust and love. Like these are the things that make the difference. And it's funny, we've talked a lot about you know how you started 99 % e-com you're now moving towards sort of the future of the brand which is putting stores in places where you have strength with customers um what kinds of data are you gathering from those in-person experiences to go back to the digital experience and how does that improve the overall feeling of the brand yeah great question and i think that there's there's of course we do a lot of things that that like I would call like fundamental table stakes we have a post-purchase survey right that that once you've placed an order for example online that it pops up or you had an interaction store it sends you an email you know tell us like why did you make this purchase like what what inspired you to make it how did you hear about us all of those things I learned the most from the one hour store manager call that I have on a weekly basis than I do from any of those like type of things.

26:15The anecdotes that you get from that can inspire so much. So I'll give you an example. We've been talking about our room service program and how, you know, again, like not everybody wants us in their homes. Some people are super private and they don't want that. And, you know, store manager, they were like, so what I've been doing is I've been asking people to take a picture of your bedroom and like email it to me. And then I can help put together like a little lookbook for you of like, what are the colors that could go with your, um, uh, with your bed frame, et cetera, with your nightstands. And I was listening to this and I was like, man, there's gotta be something, especially in the age of AI that can help us like put the actual pieces on the bed for the customer virtually.

27:05So we've been, we launched and we've been testing now since like end of April, this virtual bed designer. So it's a tool that anybody can use. It's on our website where any customer can just go take a picture, upload a picture of their bedroom and select pieces on it and will help guide you too. But it has been a game changer, I think, especially in stores, because now all of a sudden all of those like emails back and forth and the awkward like lookbooks that they were creating is completely seamless. Here's your bed. Here's our product on your bed. And again, from like what actually ends up happening, people buy everything.

27:51Of course. They're like, of course, this is what I want it to look like. Please, please send me everything. Right. So there's like real revenue implications that have now come out of this. But it started with literally a conversation that we were having with the store manager on this call. And I find the most valuable insights from that around how customers think like you're not my other like I would say like favorite we have a channel called fairing which is comes out of our post-purchase survey but we have a free form as part of it and it's like what one of the questions is like well what was frustrating about your experience what did you not get?

28:38So I, my doom scroll at night and early in the morning is that Slack channel because we're getting live feedback from people. And we learned so much, like as an example, bed skirts, not a huge market for them. Who has bed skirts these days? Like it's not, but our costs, some customers do. So out of that, they were like, man, I really wish you had a bed skirt. We're going to make a bed skirt because the people want a bed skirt. So we find so much inspiration. And again, of course, like ways to improve the website experience, but even product, even everything. And we get so much also praise for our customer experience team through those channels as well.

29:24Right. Caitlin, she was amazing. She was incredible. She went out of my out of my way. She sent my daughter a book because she's going to a big girl bed. I mean, it's just like so much valuable insights comes from that. And of course, we use AI to aggregate information and create themes and do all that stuff. But there is no, there's no shortcut for what like real life consumer insights can give you when you just go and talk to people in stores.

29:54Phillip: uh faring a long time partner of uh future commerce and powered our word of mouth index um at uh future commerce plus uh so a built-in uh selfish plug futurecommerce.com slash plus if you're a paying member you you know about the power of the word of mouth index and for many years uh what we tracked on the word of mouth index is that consistently especially in in the home category, word of mouth is the number one indicator and predictor for people to get that second purchase or convert a subscription or their propensity to keep the product and not convert like a return. So word of mouth happens to be always the highest factor for quality and for satisfaction among a customer above any other channel for how did you hear about us, which Faring is the post-purchase survey company.

31:01Phillip: And a good friend of ours, Matt, who started it there. So just a little plug there. We like them a lot. So one interesting thing, you noted AI and how AI has really delivered a lot of benefit. I think also the same AI that helps to help a consumer to visualize what can be done for them and how it might work for them within the confines of their home is also, there are tools now that might be weaponized against you in the CX channel and as the brand. And something that caught our eye a few months ago on LinkedIn, Scott Tannen, founder and CEO, Bowen Branch, had this post with a couple pictures that I think were submitted through your CX channel.

31:52Phillip: And I think the post started with AI tried to steal from us today, not theoretically, but today. But this generative AI picture was used to sort of counterfeit this idea of a damaged sheet or vetting. And we've seen this. We've reported on this now for a few months. We had this large write-up about how this is a pervasive problem with CX teams. I'm interested and curious how outside of this one incident, your team is catching these things, obviously. you're transparent in writing it up and calling it out. This went viral. How is it impacting team training and awareness? And what are you doing about it?

32:35I'll give you another example, too, of something that recently I was literally listening to a call last week with my CX team. It was a full on AI agent that called us asking for a refund. It was like but it was like so blatant.

32:52Phillip: No. Yes. Yes. It was it was epic. It was so epic. It was like, I am, hello, I am Nate. I am Brian's assistant. Brian is going to be traveling outside the country. Like it was so blatantly obvious. At one point, our team member, Rachel, she asked, she was like, are you AI? And then there was like a five minute extensive long pause. And the AI goes, no, I am Nate, Brian's assistant. It was so epic. But it does. It happens. But the reason why we caught that incident and this one to begin with is because we have real human people that are looking at this, that know the brand. In two seconds, they looked at the photo and they were like, that's not how that's not how that waffle blanket tears.

33:47Like, that's not real. That's not. It would never happen. Like even if you cut, they have been, they have seen everything. I, I'm not going to go into all the stories of all the weird gross stuff that they've seen from customer photos too, but like they've seen it all in two seconds. They were like, this is absolutely not real. Right. And that's, and that's going to happen. Right. But the benefit that we have is that we have a real team of people that sit in our summit office that are here that see this stuff all day and every day. And of course, again, they use AI tools on the back end to help them.

34:26But like, it's because they're there and they spotted it. And we're there. We have no plans to change that. So, of course, right, like we're going to be adding in some, you know, we bring on, for example, additional help during holiday because that's like peak time for us for sales and etc right people are thinking about gifting um especially for you know around thanksgiving and the holidays and stuff like that so we bring on temp help and for sure that's going to be in our training and onboarding with with them things to watch out for but the end of the day it's like it's because it's humans that understand and know our brand and know how the product is going to tear or like know how people ask for a refund if they actually want a refund because they are going to keep purchasing with the brand or if this is a actual just fraud case.

35:22Phillip: Matt Prince, who's the CEO of Cloudflare, mentioned last year at Cannes Lions. He said, we've reached the tipping point. More traffic on the internet is agentic than not. And that was 2025. We are at the post-human future of the internet, right? So most of the traffic that's on the internet right now is agentic. That means that more of our attention is going to agents than before. And I wonder, this is me wondering aloud. I'm not asking you to weigh in on it, Katya, but my concern is that I wonder at what point in the future will we have to contend with more of the agentic support calls? Because that is a human that has kicked that off on the other side of it.

36:14Phillip: At some point, we are catering to agents through AEO efforts and we want to be discoverable to agents. At least some brands are seeing that opportunity there. And I think some people have even said that it's, you know, maybe at some point it was arbitrage. Now it's commonplace. Like we need to be discoverable through ChatGPT or Claude, right? So what you're saying, Philip, is maybe the call that Katya just described earlier was actually legitimate. Like someone had to put this in motion, not as like a scam, but as like an opportunity for them to actually return their sheets that they wanted to return.

36:51and it actually was legitimate.

36:53Phillip: Well, I'm not saying it's not legitimate or it is legitimate. I'm saying that at some point in the future, we will likely reach some sort of tipping point where many of the calls, if not most of the calls, are agents. And I have to wonder if we are, you know, we have to have some protocol to have to deal with them. I'm curious if you, like, what if there is a internal, you know, playbook to have to deal with these now? They seem to be not commonplace, but, you know, you're going to have to learn to have to deal with the agent-led agentic call in the same way that you would probably deal with it differently if it was an agentic traffic that was coming into the website right we're probably a little more accepting of agentic traffic on the website than we are agentic calls into the cx team and that's more amusing than anything else i think that as the internet becomes more agentic i i wonder how much of real life is being brokered by agentic traffic as well, right?

37:49Totally, totally. Yeah. 100 % true. I mean, it's going to keep evolving. Yeah. And some of them, to your point, right, are going to be an actual, there are plenty of people that have AI assistance. Like, that's real. I think it's going to be about trying to, again, if you have an internal CX team, right, that knows the brand and knows what are the types of things typically that people actually return because of, right? Versus like there's such clear triggers for people that we know when it's fraud. For sure. I think, you know, for us, it's like training anybody that we bring on board around like what those like trigger words are that we know.

38:36But yeah, of course, there's going to be a point where someone is going to have an AI assistant call us to actually legitimate return something. Right, in which case, how do you handle that? And Philip, this is actually where I think we start to get into something you have talked about and written about before, the idea of like agentic ghettos, you called them, which is like paths for AI to actually take that are not paths that we would send humans down. Yeah, I just want to make sure I define that.

39:08Phillip: The write-up was in January of 2025, And it was when the original universal commerce protocol was announced with, you know, this consortium of folks in the commerce industry. And the goal there was for me to basically say, I think if we're going to create agents that are going around buying stuff in the world on the internet, we should probably, if they're going to be functional substitutes for human desire and human activity, then they should be using interfaces that humans use as well. We shouldn't be creating another internet just for agents, right? To me, it's creating something that humans don't interact with.

39:56Phillip: We're creating a fast lane just for agents or we're creating a slow lane for humans, right? To me, we're recreating all the lessons that we learned from the past of the mobile internet that we then backtracked on and we then created the responsive web. We've learned these lessons before and we don't need another five-year hard lesson to learn again. That's what I said around that. So my point in bringing this up, though, is this. When we talk about analog engagement, like engagement with actual people rather than technology that's sitting on the other side. So the agentic ghettos, as you put them, like when it comes to these asynchronous digital experiences that we're creating and ways of sort of fielding like interest in those things, traffic, right?

40:54and ways of funneling that traffic. It may be relatively simple to build experiences that an agent can just follow because we're talking about something that's built, a system that's built. But when we talk about engaging with actual people, this is where things start to get really tricky because now we're talking about a computer, an AI, the machine world, trying to come engage with the human world and engage. Well, the problem with that, it's infinitely scalable, right? And so I think that there's going to need to start to be some standards around this. And something that I think would be really interesting, and I want to bring this back around to the AI experience that you built, Katia.

41:36And there's an article that Brian Kempel over at the Lyceum Institute recently wrote called What Must Remain or Standards for AI Evaluation. And he had this idea about stimulation versus substitution. And I think this is really essential right now. And I think this idea of like substituting for humans and using AI as substitutes for humans, substituting tasks or processes that we've done versus things that cause us to want to engage more and learn more. So we're not just turning off our brains and putting things in the hands of the AI. We're actually using the AI to enhance or push us further towards something and actually want to master and make it our own in the process.

42:25And so I think as brands start to think about this, I think that when you substitute, if you're going to substitute for something, make sure it's something that you don't want to take away from a human. And we talk about this all the time, frictionless versus friction. Where is the good friction in the process of AI? And I think that's the question right now. And it sounds like the experience you've created in my mind is an opportunity to enhance and get people to engage in a way they feel comfortable with. I'm going to use that framing with my team when I walk out of this. It's such a good one.

43:04It is. Like that is very much we very much don't want to substitute. We don't have an AI bot on our website that you can even ask questions to. Like we don't. We believe in having an interaction. We don't want to substitute that. But we enhance right on the backside and we stimulate. Right. Like I think the virtual bed designer is a perfect example of that. We use it as an interactive tool to interact with customers, right? Like, let's add this. Let's remove this. Like, this now looks better. I really like that framing.

43:40Phillip: As always, I mean, a stimulating conversation. I'm curious, we ask all of our guests, what does the future hold? If you had to look into the crystal ball, bowl and branch of the future, you're opening new stores all the time. You've got three that we just talked about in the pre-show that are opening imminently. uh what's the what's the playbook of 2026 uh h2 2027 what do you got coming up yeah i think um it sounds really boring um and i say this all the time but it's a lot of what we're doing now and nobody i feel like people don't like to hear that but that has been you know i i love that people want to hear like a really shiny thing that we're doing but we're we're continuing to execute our plan like this is our plan and we're going to open we already have signed four more stores for next year we we are continuing to elevate our experience in Nordstrom locations and Bloomingdale's locations to make sure that it looks like really brand right and that those teams there are also educated on our brand so like it's really a lot of those types of things and it's not we're coming out with some sexy new cool thing.

44:51I will say one piece that we are like, I think that is remains like a big opportunity for us is we do have an interior designer program. We do have like a small like hospitality program, but that space, as you can imagine, is very relevant for us. So I think that there's a lot of opportunity and like headroom to grow and that side for us. So I'm very excited about that. I love that. Blocking and tackling. That's how you build a brand. Good product, good people, develop affection. I mean, what can get better than that in this day and age? Thanks, Brian. Thank you both.

45:28Phillip: What an incredible brand. What an incredible set of accomplishments and to have done it over such a long period of time. Incredible. Katya Unluz, the chief commercial officer at Bull & Branch, and congrats on all the success and wish you continued success in the future. Thank you so much. This was so fun, you guys.

46:13shelf over here.

46:15Phillip: We have a whole library of these now. This is our fifth book and we've got some new stuff coming. So commerce and culture together and beautifully crafted books, zines and things for your coffee table, your bookshelf. And anyway, remember that commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We'll see you next time.