How Bobbie's brand playbook led to landing Cardi B

0:09Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Modern Retail Podcast, where we discuss the ways retail is changing and modernizing. I am senior reporter Gabby Barco here with my co-host Melissa Daniels. Hello, Melissa. How are you this week? I'm doing well. It's a beautiful fall day here in Southern California and we have so much retail news to get into. And yeah, I couldn't be more excited about Halloween being next week too. I'm just super amped. That and also I received, I feel like we need to bring it up on mic because I received the most frantic Instagram DM from you the other day where we're not going to discuss this collection more broadly, but we have to call out the Adidas Pets Collection because it's bonkers.

1:02I'm kind of obsessed. It's like the cutest thing you've ever seen. And I now most certainly need these little like streetwear track jackets for my Doxy and my Cheweenie. They're just like made to make little dogs look cool, I feel like. Yeah, I mean, I want to hear everyone's experiences and thoughts. If you're out there dressing your dog in Adidas, get at me. Yeah, I mean, listener, I just implored you, please go check out the Instagram. I even saw some people commenting like, Like, wow, Nike has 48 hours to respond. Like, it's, yeah, it's pretty fun. Well, you know, the photography is really, I think is what is so excellent about this collection.

1:54You know, it really is just like, like these cats and dogs that are so cute out here looking like athletes. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, no. Okay, we have to move on because I'm just staring at it. I would talk about this for 40 minutes, so we should move on. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Well, later on in the episode, we are going to have an interview that Melissa conducted with Kim Chappell, the chief brand officer at Bobby, the formula company. And they are fresh off of their mommy campaign with Cardi B. That one also went pretty viral. So I am excited to listen to that one with you guys. All right. But first, let's get into the rundown portion of the episode.

2:37we are going to be talking about Quince beating IP infringement claims from Deckers over their fuzzy boot design. And then we are going to unpack the latest live shopping news, which is Twitch partnering with Elf on a new partnership to live sell on the platform. All right. So for Quince, essentially what happened is that a judge ruled in favor of Quince on this lawsuit that Deckers, the parent company of Uggs, had filed about two years ago. You know, pretty big win for Quince here. What are your thoughts? Yeah, so as frequent listeners of this podcast might know, I am a bit of an IP geek and thought this was a pretty interesting suit.

3:24It started in 2023 when Deckers filed a lawsuit against Quince, alleging that two of their boot design copied its Uggs. Obviously not the first company to do an Ugg dupe, but given the size and scale of Quince, it made sense that Deckers would want to go after them. But the judge in this case ruled that Uggs designs were, quote, too generic to qualify for trade dress protection. So the two designs that Deckers alleged Quince duped or copied are the UGG Classic Ultra Mini Boot and the Tasman Clog, which is a huge seller, especially among young people. So yeah, they claim that they qualify for a trade dress and that they have US patents on these designs, but the judge disagreed, obviously.

4:16Yeah, what the judge said, and this was a judge in the Northern District of California for those curious about jurisdiction. They found that the trade dress with, quote unquote, utilitarian or aesthetic functionality cannot be protected by trademark law. Right. And then I guess the, you know, sheepskin and the shirling also doesn't qualify, I guess, because there are hundreds of brands that are making similar designs. Yeah. So with that, let's talk more about where Quinn stands as a brand because they have made a name for themselves for making these quote unquote dupes or inspired by designs. I mean, we're talking everything from these Ugg boots to luxury handbags.

5:03They make a pretty good dupe of the Loewe puzzle bag, for example, that one I see come up a lot on sites. And so, yeah, speaking of actually earlier this year, they also ran into some copyright complaints from Coach, specifically Tapestry, which is their parent company. So they have another lawsuit, I guess, that's awaiting. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, too, from a consumer perspective, because Quince kind of makes no bones about the fact that, hey, we're making this for less than the brand you might have originally seen it at. You know, I think they even call out on their product description pages what you would pay for a similar item at Anthropologie or Reformation or Coach or whatever.

5:52You know, Quince's name itself is being contested in court, which I think is funny, or had been contested. I mean, a quince is a fruit, right? So it's something that, you know, Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant named Quince. And they have settled that suit last year. Yeah. They're both San Francisco-based. So maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe a jurisdiction issue. Yeah. The chef was claiming that they sell these chef tools that I guess the restaurant was getting returns of and complaints about because they were buying them from Quince, the e-com site. So it got a little convoluted there.

6:34That is not something your hostess needs to deal with, is returns from another company's product. But yeah, no, all of this to me, though, points to this sort of growing issue we have in this world of retail and e-commerce, which is that, you know, good ideas get viral. They get really popular. Somebody finds a cheaper or more efficient way to make that product and find it to customers. And then if you have the will, you might wind up in court. You know, one topic I've written a lot about is the shoe company Kizik. They have a whole arm of their businesses dedicated to IP protection. And they even hope to do more licensing because they say, look, we have all these patents and all these ways of making slip on shoes.

7:17They'd rather be making money off of it than suing people about it. So I think this is just another example of how intellectual property law is being, you know, wielded in very specific cases. We just don't have uniformity in this area, in this industry right now. Right. And at the end of the day, I guess it's at the discretion of whatever judge in that district decided. Yeah. And, you know, this isn't just Quince, right? You know, I think a lot of people earlier this year saw headlines when Lululemon sued Costco. So people love themselves a good Costco dupe. And Lululemon said, look, these are our products.

7:55I should probably check in on where that case stands. We haven't heard anything lately, but I'm sure they're going at it. Yeah, we'll keep an eye out. All right. Well, now let's talk about Twitch testing live selling with brands. First up is going to be Elf, which is the cosmetic brand. and they are going to be directly selling through live streams on Twitch. It's pretty exciting, but then it kind of got me thinking like, oh, okay, well, we're still doing social commerce, I guess, right? I thought that kind of fell off the wayside post-COVID, but I don't know. What do you think? I don't know. I think social commerce is kind of having a little resurgence right now.

8:37I feel like the live shopping capabilities that people have on TikTok as well as whatnot are are just going to keep that little engine running. And I think there's demand from consumers to shop in new ways that are a little more getting that touch and feel experience that they might otherwise have in a brick and mortar. You know, in this case, Elf is the first brand to test this integration with Twitch. But I wouldn't be surprised to see brands in other categories follow suit. I think this is something that could work for apparel, could work for home decor, could work for workout gear. We'll see where it goes.

9:15Yeah. And, you know, Twitch is associated with gaming and watching, you know, gamers live. But they do actually have a burgeoning beauty community of like fans and creators and enthusiasts. So obviously Elf and Twitch are hoping that they can bridge that gap and get to those fans pretty quickly and hopefully convert them right away. Yeah. Yeah. And when you think about the scale of this, the opportunity is really just a sky's the limit kind of thing. There's tens of millions of people who are logging onto Twitch every month. It has a huge user base. And when you think about what that does for your customer funnel, there's a lot of brands that I think would be really, really hungry to tap that audience.

10:00Does the live shopping piece of that fit with all of those brands? Well, maybe, maybe not. But I think there's a lot of brands that are making that work for them. You know, our colleague Julia Waldo recently wrote about all the ways that QVC is making TikTok shop work for them. I'm even seeing a ton still happening with Poshmark and the live streaming that they do with Posh shows. So I don't know if this will ever be the dominant way that people do online shopping, but I do think it's going to have a bigger role to play as social platforms just continue to integrate with commerce. And then, of course, this is all being powered by Amazon ads.

10:42And then, you know, maybe we can talk a little bit about some of these other platforms that Twitch is going up against. I mean, everyone is investing in this space, including TikTok, like you just mentioned, YouTube, Amazon Live itself. And yeah, it's a competitive space and everyone is trying to essentially get people to purchase at the very top of the tunnel while you're watching something and kind of making that impulse purchase. But yeah, we haven't really seen it, I guess, pan out as widely as it has in other areas of the world. You know, Asia is obviously known for this type of format. But it seems like the retailers, the Walmarts of the world feel like they can still make something of it.

11:32Yeah, I think there's going to be, you know, pockets of it that keep popping up. And I also think that maybe with holiday right around the corner, we might see some interesting use cases from brands experimenting with live shopping. Yeah. The other thing I think of is sort of where the creator and influencer marketing space is right now is it's in such flux that, you know, doing lives might be another lever for brands that are maybe having some trouble, you know, getting sales from those channels. Yeah, I mean, well, when you think about, you know, Elf doing this partnership in particular, they've already been on Twitch.

12:12They've been on Twitch since 2020. So they already have a pretty solid foundation of people who are used to engaging with Elf on that platform. I think I saw some data that says the Elf channel on Twitch has had more than 43 million minutes watched, more than 800 ,000 chat messages, and over 64 ,000 minutes streamed. So they already have people engaging with them there. And I think selling to that community on top of that is a pretty natural progression. And the channel is called ElfU, which I thought was fun. That is fun. All right. Well, Melissa, let's talk a little bit about your guest this week.

12:55I'm pretty excited. Kim from Bobby came onto the show this week to talk to you about all the ways that they're building out their brand, including partnering with Cardi B, who is also a mom herself, of course. Yeah, this is a really fun conversation with Kim Chappell, the chief brand officer at the Formula Company, Bobby. And we really sort of centered this conversation on her role as a chief brand officer, which is kind of a unique role inside of a C-suite. It's not something that every company has. But Bobby very strategically has made brand a center of sort of everything they do. And so I had my conversation with Kim right after the launch of this new Cardi B campaign.

13:40And so we got into the weeds about just manifesting your brand and all of the things that you do, all of your public expression, not just marketing. And we got some really fun insights into what it was like to work with Cardi along the way. All right. Well, listen out for that right after the break.

14:06Even if you don't have a baby, you might have heard of Bobby. This infant formula company has made a big mark in the CPG world since launching in 2021 as a direct-to-consumer subscription brand. In October, the brand made a big splash by teaming up with Cardi B as their new chief confidence officer. But behind the scenes, helping to pull all this together and tell the Bobby story is someone in the C-suite called a chief brand officer, which isn't something we hear for all the companies that we cover here at Modern Retail. So today we have Bobby's chief brand officer, Kim Chappell. She's also a mom of three who lives with her family in Austin, Texas, and we're here to talk with her about all things brand and how brand overlays so much of what they do at Bobby.

14:54We're going to pull back the curtain on how brand is showing up in all parts of the business. Kim, welcome to the Modern Retail Podcast. Thank you so much, Melissa. It's so great to be here. I appreciate the opportunity. Oh, well, I appreciate talking with you. I think people who are business and retail curious see Bobby, even if they're not in a stage of parenting or not a parent who isn't even connected to infant formula, I still feel like they see you showing up as a brand because you are in so many places. So I'm excited to have this conversation. But let's just bring it back to the role for a minute and level set about what it is a chief brand officer does.

15:35What are your main goals and responsibilities in this position? So when I was brought on to Bobby, I was hired as the first marketing hire. But my background is much like yours. I was a reporter. I was a reporter for 10 years. And then I worked in PR and comms. My muscle that I knew how to flex was storytelling and connection and telling those stories and making people feel something. And that is what I knew how to do. And so when I joined Bobby, I did not come with a performance marketing background, a growth background, I really came with the brand building in my bones. And that is what I did from day one at Bobby.

16:17And building this brand and building this marketing engine was really around community. It was around storytelling. It was around sharing our customer stories and around telling the stories of parenthood and motherhood in a motive and meaningful way that hadn't been done in our industry. And that hopefully helped us break through the noise, but also helped parents feel seen and heard in their feeding journeys of year one of being a parent. And so as I started to do that, well, first of all, it was really clear that if we wanted to have performance marketing, we were going to need to hire somebody that knew the hell what they were doing there.

16:56So that was, and from the jump, that became a different engine at Bobby than how we treated and resourced brand. And it reminds me a little bit of when I worked in a newsroom and there was the sales team and there was the newsroom team. And those two were not really allowed to intersect. They stayed in their lanes. And I think when we first started, that's how we treated it. Now we understand how brand fuels growth, how growth fuels brand, like the two really working hand in hand. But this company was built on brand. And so as we built out our first C-suite, Laura was very adamant about this not being a CMO, not having a chief revenue or growth officer yet, but that we continue to lean into what got us to where we are, which is brand.

17:49And obviously a great product as well. But having a chief brand officer and having that title was important because it just showed that that is where we put our resourcing and that is what we prioritize as a company in this space. Yeah. And I think it's such a 21st century company move, right? I mean, when you think about the companies that as consumers we know and love the most, there is some storytelling and connection there about why it matters to us in our lives. And I feel like, you know, when you talk about brand fueling growth and growth fueling brand, that's the stuff you get to bring out, right?

18:29Of like, why do customers love this? How do we talk to our customer? What is it that their pain points are? And how do we solve that as a company? Totally. And I think because in the beginning, we were the customer. I mean, our founder just had her fourth baby last year. She's still the customer. And so by living and breathing that same experience as so many of our customers, it came really effortlessly because we didn't have to think about, oh, what is it like to be up in the middle of the night with your baby and then have to go to work the next day and try to pump all day when you're exhausted?

19:05That's what we were doing. And we were going through that same struggle. And so finding those stories to tell and being able to connect with the mom on the other side of Instagram or Facebook or whatever the channel was and is, was relatively effortless because we were living and breathing the same experience as them in that moment. Yeah. I feel like there's something to this notion that you are your customer and you don't need to get consultants for it that at its core, really good brand is sometimes a lot about that gut instinct of, yeah, I know this is good. And yeah, I know people need this and kind of following that and honing that.

19:48Yes. The gut call is underrated. And I think that, well, I would say two things. Okay. First off, all the data heads are freaking out, right? I know. I'm sorry. The gut call is underrated, but it's also people, someone asked me one time, how do you know it's a gut call? Like, like what is the thing that makes you feel it? And I realized that it's when you're so excited to share the idea, to tell your boss, to like tell the team, like you just can't even wait your after hours. You're like, you guys, what if we worked with Cardi B? What, you know, whatever the thing is, what would that look like?

20:22And you just know in your heart that like there's something there, there, you know, you can justify those gut calls with data, of course. And I'm not, I'm not dismissing data, but I also think as you start to scale and grow as a company and serve a wider and wider group of customers, you do need to balance the gut calls with the channel, the customer, the data, the insights that can help guide you through that because it does get more complicated. I would argue that one of our customers in, you know, Target in Kansas is not the same as the Brooklyn mom in that's a D2C customer getting a subscription to her doorstep every month.

21:04They have different ideas of what they want from us and what they need from us. And so understanding how to speak to them in those channels, I think is also is part of where gut and data sort of marry up. Yeah. And then, but still having it come back to brand, right? Or still rooting it in brand as you're communicating out to different channels, different demos. You mentioned Cardi B, Big fan here. Yeah, I feel like that's a great example for you to walk us through about, you know, what a chief brand officer does and how you show up in these big moments and engineer these big moments for the company, right?

21:44So how did it work coordinating with Cardi to be your quote unquote chief confidence officer? Yeah. Which is fueling a whole new campaign. It's a really fun story to tell. And I'm so glad that we're talking shortly after this campaign launch that I can share it with you. And this is what I love about working at Bobby is that you just never know who's going to be in your inbox. And I am on my computer on a Thursday morning and I get an email that says, Cardi B times Bobby, question mark. And I about spit my lukewarm coffee right out of my mouth and jumped out of my desk and was like, oh my God.

22:23Oh my God. And, you know, I work at home. We're a fully remote company. So I'm by myself in my home office in Austin thinking, holy shit, who do I call? Like, I need to call somebody. And I think I called Laura. And, you know, that was the beginning of what turned into a conversation on a call with her talent manager, Vatana Shah, who was amazing through the whole process. But she reached out to us to work together because Cardi chose Bobby for her baby Blossom. She had been feeding her baby Bobby for a year. And, you know, this was after two bouts with breastfeeding and she got to the third baby and she's working hard.

22:58We know she's a hardworking mom and formula was the right choice for her for that baby. And we fully, of course, respect that decision for her. And they said, she loves the product. She loves the brand and what you stand for. Let's figure out something together. And I'm also in that moment looking at what our marketing calendar for the rest of the year. I'm looking at my budget for the rest of the year and I'm saying, how the hell are we going to pull this off? I don't have the money. I don't have the time and I don't have the resources to do a campaign with someone who's been in Super Bowl commercials and the brand deals that she's done with Pepsi and all these other things are crazy.

23:37And I just knew again to that gut call, I'm like, we can figure this out. We have to figure this out. And this is the other magic of working at Bobby. I think people think, right? They're like, oh, you must've spent millions and millions of dollars to get Cardi B. No, we don't have millions and millions of dollars to spend on Cardi B. We are a very lean, efficient, and scrappy team. We do everything, all of our creative for our brand in-house with a fantastic and hustling team of moms. And we are able to land some of these amazing celebrities who come through the door because they are feeding their baby this product seven times a day.

24:14They are making those bottles. They are opening the cans. They are unboxing it. And we all know that Cardi is such a hands-on mom. She's so dialed in with her kids. She's present. She's doing the work with them day to day. And she's making those bottles. And so she was like, I want to support this brand. And so we got the deal of all deals and we're able to work with her. And then it's like, okay, we've aligned on that part. And now what the hell are we going to do with her? And we thought about what is, if you had this concentric circle of Bobby and Cardi, what's the middle slice? What is it?

24:45Like, where does it make sense for us to be showing up? What are our shared values? And we figured it out really quickly. She is the most confident mother, unapologetic in her choices. She says what she wants to say. She doesn't, sometimes too many things, right? But she apologizes when she needs to apologize. And she is just so confident now in who she is and what she's after and how she is so unapologetic and how she mothers now publicly. I think we realize, wait, that's exactly what we stand for at Bobby. Making the choices that you want to make, feeling confident however you feed your baby, whether that's publicly breastfeeding in a place that makes other people uncomfortable, who cares?

25:29Or choosing the formula of your choice or combo feeding, whatever that looks like. And then I thought about it and I was like, and there's more, right? Parents' confidence in U.S. formula has been broken by the 2022 formula shortage. Broken. Okay, there's no trust because, as we know, a large legacy company had a bacterial recall. All formulas wiped off the shelf. No one can find it. There was trust in the quality, the safety, and the supply of U.S. infant formulas. And we are here having just purchased this state-of-the-art facility making high-quality organic EU organic formula here in the U.S.

26:11And we want to communicate to parents that we're here. Like, hello, hi, we're over here. Like, you don't have to import formula. High-quality formula is made here and you can have confidence again. And then I realized, wait, there's more. I feel like one of those callers, but wait, there's more. We also wanted to have the confidence to know that our collective voices and our experiences as mothers matters and that it can collectively make change. And that's where our advocacy arm, Bobby for Change, comes in. And we knew that Cardi could speak to the lack of paid leave in this country, the quality of U.S.

26:50infant formulas. And also as a woman of color who is pregnant with her fourth baby, she has the right and the responsibility to speak to the Black maternal mortality crisis in this country, which is one of the pillars of Bobby for Change. And so all of that came really beautifully together with our team as we were just like, yeah, boom, boom, boom at this, you know, I say round table, it was a Zoom, but it all centers around confidence. And that's what we believe in Bobby. And if not choosing Bobby means that you're a confident mom, good for you. Like whatever works for you works for you. And this is where you get into like the mommy where it's like, oh, you're sleep training or you're in daycare.

27:28You're not, or you're baby led weaning. It's like, who cares? Just be, stop comparing yourself. Stop comparing yourself to every mother on Instagram. Stop comparing your, even Cardi spoke to this in her interview with Vogue. She said, just because this works for me of hustling and going back to work and formula feeding and being pregnant, like, doesn't mean it works for you. And that's okay. We can all be confident in our individual choices. And so that's what I hope comes through. And I hope people can feel and understand not only that we have a great product, but what we stand for as a brand.