S13 E11: Marketing, Mega-Catalogs, Mattresses, and More (with Jared Brody, EVP Marketing at Resident + Ashley Furniture)

0:00Nik:Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. Okay, today is actually a really cool episode. I sat down with this guy named Jared. And let me tell you about this guy named Jared. Jared runs all things marketing for Resident Home. Resident was acquired for a billion dollars by Ashley Furniture. And, you know, is one of the only slash most successful mattress direct to consumer companies. They were always known as, you know, the most efficient marketers, the most forward thinking marketers, you know, always on the cutting edge of the market. what's new. And so I talked to Jared, he's been running everything there for six years.

0:34Nik:And then recently, you know, when they got acquired by Ashley, he basically built out an agency to service all of Ashley's media needs, along with, you know, trying to figure out how to market a catalog of hundreds of 1000s of furniture pieces. So today's episode goes pretty deep with Jared, we talked all things, you know, agency, like what are the roles that he built for the Ashley internal agency? How does he keep the team motivated? What is he doing for Black Friday? How does he think about catalog ads? What does he think about app loving and everything in between? So take a listen. Let me know what you think.

1:09Nik:If you've got any questions, you can reach out to Jared directly on LinkedIn, or you could just email him. He puts his email there at the end. And if you've got any questions for me, you can always email me or DM me. But enjoy the episode. it's a very fun one I enjoyed doing it I felt like a nerdy kid in the growth candy store and I'll see you next time all right Jared I'm stoked to have you here so people probably saw from the title but you run all things marketing over at resident which is now under the Ashley home umbrella which is very exciting because as a kid those used to be my favorite buildings I lived in San Diego, so I would see this massive pyramid-looking building, and it was always this mysterious Ashley Home building with a ton of awesome furniture inside.

1:58Nik:But excited to have you here on the podcast, excited to dive into all things direct-to-consumer, new channels, Q4. Before we get started, do you mind giving us just a quick, brief background on yourself? Almost frame it as if it was your mother who's bragging at a family's party and telling everybody why you're so great. Sounds good. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I appreciate being here. I'm looking forward to it as well. So my background, I've been doing this for a while. I've been in direct marketing for decades at this point. I know that sounds like a long time and it certainly is.

2:34I started in a traditional sort of direct marketing agency where we were basically aggregating data through free products or sweepstakes, things like that. And we were turned around and market to that data back in the day when there were things like long distance was separated from your local exchange carrier. We would get paid bounties for delivering each time to those customers, delivering credit card, credit card applications, ringtones. Remember those things when you actually had to pay for wallpaper and ringtones? I know I'm dating myself a little bit, but there was a time when that stuff existed.

3:09So I did that for a good 10, 11 years. That was really where I cut my teeth direct marketing. And it was, you know, the way I look at that is marketing products that people probably weren't seeking out based on relationships I hardly had with them, which is not the easiest thing to do. Because someone signs up for a sweet steak, that doesn't exactly mean you have a long lasting relationship with them like you would with a brand or something like that. So after about 10 or 11 years there, I went more on the brand side of marketing to a couple brands in the skincare care space, the hair care space, the pet space, some entrepreneurial stints in between.

3:48I tried to invent a few products, a dog leash, a baby bottle. What was the other one? Another one. How is the baby bottle different? So it would work when, well, a cup, not necessarily a bottle, but a cup. So when you turned it upside down, a kid, a toddler could still drink out of it. It turns out, I never brought it to market. It turns out someone did bring one similar to market and did a really good job. So it was the right idea. Wrong time, perhaps. And then I started, these were also on the side, a coconut chip company with a friend of mine, a vegan, organic, dehydrated coconut chip company.

4:26That was very interesting. Did it for about a year. Then went into ad tech for two years, which was definitely a different change. Nothing I had ever done before way out of my comfort zone, but a great learning experience, I think really evolved how I think about marketing, what I knew about marketing. But then I wanted to get back in the brand side. And that was six years ago when I went to resident, been there coming up on six years.

4:49Nik:Amazing. I also spent, I did two years in ad tech, and I feel like it gave me a set of knowledge that is not otherwise like commonly known. Like no one in this world knows about DMPs, DSPs, you know, SSPs. But, but yeah, that's awesome. So you've been at resident now six years. So you got you were there pre acquisition, what's life like pre acquisition versus post acquisition? For me, it's very different. So I'll start with the company. So this really was, you know, I'd like to say a textbook acquisition with respect to synergies between the two companies where, you know, I'd like to think that we're pretty good at marketing.

5:32And that is some of the functions that we've taken over for Ashley. And they're the best in the world at manufacturing and production and shipping big and bulky items. And that's what they're doing for us. So it is really, you know, it really works. It's working out great, because we're each be we're each able to focus on our airs expertise, or company level. For me, my life has definitely changed. So So obviously, I was 100 % of my time dedicated to resident prior to the acquisition. Post-acquisition, I spent a good amount of my time, so I split my duties now between resident and what I do for Ashley.

6:07On the resident side, it's a lot of the same stuff in charge of acquisition, CRM, creative optimizations and operations. And then on the Ashley side, I had to build an internal team to take over their marketing spend that they were spending via agencies. so that was definitely a different change and we had to build Residence is a very lean company so it's not like we had resources that we could just pile all this work on so I had to build the team as we were doing it which was pretty challenging to be honest with you.

6:38Nik:I've worked with massive companies in the past and their agencies they tend to use they're like the PhDs of the world and they lose their mind if you try to talk about conversion based marketing or optimizing toward a click was is that kind of like what ashley was doing prior like were they were they almost like not doing the performance marketing where you guys were like wait a second all we do is performance marketing yes yes and no um so what we want to do is wanted to come in understand what was going on be able to take over execution without changing much you know maybe making some smarter changes with respect to operations there was a lot of inefficiency with how work was being done, but then kind of get our foot.

7:22It's a very complex business, way more complex than Residence. So we wanted to get our footing. We wanted to really understand the business a little bit and then start making changes to the media mix and optimizations. So kind of what you're alluding to. So it took us two months or so to really get our footing. And then we started to make really big changes to the media mix based on what we knew what was performance to your point, you know, we have a good amount of experience in what we know what works. Uh, so we'd made these big swings and these big changes and it really, really paid off. Um, the changes to the business were almost immediate and we've carried that forward, uh, you know, through today.

8:00And of course we've improved as we've really, you know, we were over a year into it. So we've certainly learned a lot more, but, uh, the first couple months were crazy.

8:08Nik:Yeah. Um, I'm curious, just as a side note, like, you know, anytime I've gone into the ad account of a really well-known brand. And even if it's run poorly, their CPAs are somehow massively lower than whatever the competitive new brand is, the Challenger brand. Were you shocked by their CPAs when you went in because of how strong the Ashley brand is? Yes and no. I think the overall business was surprising with respect to what I would call the overall efficiency, meaning all revenue and all spend. Now within that, you know, you get the benefit of brand. That's where it shows up. You know, you get a lot of organic and a lot of direct traffic.

8:54So, you know, within the platforms themselves, there was a lot of changes that need to be made.

9:01Nik:Yeah. I was surprised at the overall features of the business with respect to how Resident runs its business. Now, it had to be more efficient because there are retail stores and there's real overhead associated with that, which resident, we don't own any grown stores, even though in retail. So there were really, really different factors that played into that. Yeah, it makes sense. One thing you mentioned was sort of like building this like internal agency to take over operations from prior agency partners. You know, that's something I've seen that a lot of brands are doing, especially this year post tariffs is they've thought, you know, How can we bring this in-house or stop paying this as a service out of house, keep the learnings in-house, keep all the creative, everything?

9:42Nik:How did you think about building that in terms of the roles, in terms of – and maybe if you can't share anything, that might be proprietary. Just think about the average founder who's building a business and that's doing maybe anywhere from$25 to$100 million in revenue. You know, a lot of times they might be paying an agency and spending, you know, one to three million dollars a month in ad spend. So maybe they're paying their agency anywhere from, you know, 30 to 200K in terms of all their agencies. It definitely gives you a good amount of firepower to like build an internal team. And so I'm curious, like how you think about that from a roles or processes or, you know, all of that.

10:24Nik:And also, you know, especially coming from the resident side, like where everything was super lean and still had a family of brands, you know, pre-acquisition, like still running efficiently. What kind of learnings did you take from there to then put into this team here? I think some of the immediate takeaways or rather ideas that we ported over from resident to what I was building for Ashley was really making sure that you have subject matter experts in-house in your core platforms. Um, so, um, you know, I, I think there were some instances where, um, you know, the, the skill level wasn't necessary, uh, uh, of the team that was running, you know, running the spend wasn't necessary, wasn't up to, it isn't to sound harsh, but I'd say our standards at resident.

11:14So we really wanted to up-level that. Now, having said that, there are also elements of that business that we really weren't that familiar with. So we did lean on the existing team, not necessarily the agency that was spending the money, but the internal people and the internal marketing team had asked you to really help understand that business. So, you know, it was a mix of various things. Now, on top of that, we're looked at as an internal agency. So we kind of have to answer to, you know, a client, that client being Ashley. So that does take a different skill set as well, where you need to sort of manage relationships and expectations, even though it's the same company.

11:56It's very different than me saying I'm managing marketing for Resonant. Sure, people have to answer to, but that's different than saying I'm managing marketing for Ashley and have to answer to another marketing team. So that took a little – there were people that we needed that skill set for that we did not have and never had internal at resident.

12:17Nik:And is it pretty easy to take learnings across the brands?

12:25No. I wish it was. Yeah, I know. I mean, you know, like large – what works and what doesn't work, sure. But this is a way more complex business, tens of thousands of SKUs, a true omni-channel retailer with wholly owned stores. Very, very different than Resident, which is the vast majority of what we do is online, even though I mentioned we're in retail stores. But it's hard to connect those things at Resident. with Ashley, it's not easy, but you do have a path to connecting online spend to real retail results. And we could never do that at Resident.

13:10Nik:Right. And for something like that, are you guys building your own measurement in-house for that? We are. So Resident, we are a buy versus build mentality. So at Resident, we have built our own tools for pretty much everything under the sun. We've built our own ID graph. We've built our own MMM models, our own multi-touch attribution models. And we are in the process of doing that for Ashley as well. But it's a longer journey and a harder journey because the real key is if we can connect that online spend to what is happening in stores via an internal MTA and understand that connection, you know, that online spend to, in that path to conversion.

13:58And if that path to conversion is in retail, that's a step that is even harder to connect than if it's just online.

14:04Nik:How, how, how is like the, or how has your approach changed? Because, you know, over here, you're basically marketing a massive catalog compared to fewer products and maybe going deeper on the individual product story or benefits education there. Like, how does that change? Obviously catalog ads, But I'm curious how you think about that more holistically, like from a marketing mix standpoint, from a content standpoint, from, you know, does that mean your background's in direct mail? Do you also hammer catalogs there online and offline? So direct mail has always been, you know, it's been a piece of what I've done in the past.

14:40But that is direct mail. So it's a piece of the mix. But in terms of how I think about it and how it's different, you know, one of the things that I'd say, how do I compare and contrast it with resident? Even though it's very, very difficult to be perfect, we try. You'll never be perfect. But you have a lot better chance of being close to perfect if you can control all the data and if you're primarily online. On the Ashley side, I had to take a step back and say, you know, I had mentioned we made some serious changes to the media mix. and that is almost uncomfortable to do because now granted it's based on endemic knowledge of what we know has worked but it's it's a different business so with respect to measurement for Ashley we did say we're going to make these big swings now we're obviously we're going to fine tune what we're doing inside of the platforms that already exist and apply our know-how but just cutting out entire channels you know doubling down on others and seeing the impact on the business, you know, sometimes don't overcomplicate it.

15:45Like if you make these changes and you're seeing the impact on the business, go with it. Like you don't have to worry about being perfect. And it's really, really different between how I think about that for resident and how I think about that for Ashley. Yeah.

15:55Nik:How do you even handle like, uh, feed management? Uh, so we, we have a feed provider, um, and we work with, um, the Ashley, uh, the, the internal Ashley team. But there's so many complications. They have different pricing zones. At one point, I think there were 12. I think there's four now, or we're getting towards four. That means different price for the same product? Different price for the same product in different geographic regions. Got it. Which, you know, it poses diagnostic issues in terms of solving, trying to diagnose problems and solve problems, because Google may think something is out of stock when it's really not, based on the region that it's showing or the region that the crawler is coming from.

16:34Um, um, there is, um, it's, you know, the, the catalog is always, it's, it, you know, it's, it's constantly changing as well. There's a lot of, um, you know, some third party products in there as well as a wholly owned products. And then there's exclusive products. So there are, it is, um, it's, it's a beast and it's not something we really had a lot of experience with that resident because it's much smaller catalog. Yeah. But, you know, uh, so we, we work hand in hand with their team on that.

16:58Nik:One thing that just came to mind is there's got to be hundreds of thousands of automated email flows that are being pushed out to these people because you're, again, focusing on such a wide catalog. I imagine a lot of it is dynamically populated based on browser behavior or user behavior actions. Can you speak a little bit to like how that gets done or how you guys think about lifecycle marketing with so many SKUs? So that's actually not an area that we have taken over for Ashley. We're really been focusing on acquisition and media spend and creative. um now i did we did get involved a little bit early on just to you know advise a little see you know see how things were being done um and it is like you said it is very um you know it's very different because at ashley there really is the opportunity a bigger opportunity to drive lifetime value with resident of course we'd want to sell people a mattress and then try and follow up and drive that ltv up with sheets a bed frame for you know some bedroom furniture some other stuff.

18:07But our business at resident is spend money, get people to convert to buying a mattress, and everything on top of that is gravy. Now, of course, in that session, you upsells everything you can. And of course, there are repeat purchase flows at resident, but at Ashley, it's much more important to the business because there are so many more rooms in the house than just the bedroom. And like you said, there are hundreds of thousands of SKUs where there is real relationship between those products. Right.

18:37Nik:How have you guys started, or if you don't, or I don't know if you do, do you use AI much? If so, I'm curious how you guys leverage AI, whether it's just simple workflows or like using more agentic AI. So we are using AI at resident on the creative side a lot. We have a very robust naming protocol for our ads because with selling mattresses or furniture, you can't really do A-B test, A-B-C test. You can't spend enough money because there's not enough signal on those cells. So what we want to do is understand the elements of the ads and what is working rolled up to those elements across everything.

19:24So if we parse out incoming data by room color, beats per minute of the music, actually the angle of the mattress is something we test. Wow. So you parse that data out and then combine it and see what the trends are across everything. So understand at a broad level what's working. That naming convention is crazy. So we're using AI to modify that and work on naming that, as well as creative generation as well. And there are some things I've used AI for recently. One of the major tent poles for, I think it was Memorial Day weekend, results were phenomenal. And I wanted to make sure that I knew as much of a reason for why.

20:08So, of course, there is different platform changes year over year. There's different results year over year. There's different sales year over year. But I wanted to broaden that and see, is there anything that happened last year for Memorial Day weekend that was different from this year? And it turned out last year was terrible weather. So, you know, that was a reason why people were out and shopping this Memorial Day weekend, which I would not have thought of on my own. I mean, it was a simple example, but it's sort of those off the cuff when it's not real regimented, like the creative stuff I mentioned.

20:38It's really just off the cuff and trying to ask questions and trying to explain some of the things that I may not know why things happen.

20:44Nik:Yeah, totally. Do you use, like, in that workflow of understanding the creative that's working or not, do you also use AI's computer vision to, like, to watch those videos and come up with those naming conventions? So we're starting to. So we're starting to. We would – so we think there's value in computer vision to understanding the elements. And you're breaking that out into tags. You know, what is this ad? Is it, are there people in it? Are there pets in it? You know, is it lifestyle? Is it not, things like that. So that's actually, that's what I'd like to get to because we do that manually by naming these ads.

21:22We have people on our teams dedicated to naming ads, which in today's day and age certainly sounds like something that could be improved upon. I'm not looking to replace them. I'm looking to make their jobs easier by using tools like that. But yeah, something like that.

21:39Nik:Totally. Any, in general, any cool tools you've seen that have caught your eye? You don't have to name them or just talk about like what they do that's interesting to you. Some of the stuff you mentioned. So it's, you know, it's identifying what's working from a creative standpoint. Now, a lot of the limitations I find there are that those results are pulled from platform unless you are hooking up your source of truth or your MTA and you're feeding that back to the platform, which in turn, you know, that could cause different sorts of problems. So I think tools like that are useful. And then if you take that a step further, there are tools out there in the creative world that will actually develop briefs for you, you know, based on that stuff, as well as do competitive analyses.

22:22So, you know, I think that's a classic use case. You know, we are also experimenting with VO3 to try and simply... Have you played with Nano Banana? Well, I haven't gotten there yet. But I've asked my team to try and recreate a successful ad using VO3. Now, I think it's six to eight seconds that you can only do in the beginning. So really for the hooks, to be honest with you, and see if they can recreate a hook that we've spent studio time and money on in terms of developing. And if we can do that with people that are not experts in this, I'm talking about like my growth team, some of the creative operations and optimizations team.