The Power of Connection

I think I read that when you were at Kaboodle, you also made it a daily exercise to come up with at least 10 potential new products every day.

10 potential new ideas?

New ideas, maybe that’s what I read.

Well, I think the thing which I tried to do is to interact with at least a dozen or so customers a day, maybe that’s sort of what you’re remembering. So, I don’t know if I can come up with 10 ideas, Thuy, but I can definitely talk to ten customers. So actively talking to customers is definitely an important part of the exercise. And that’s the thing I’ve missed the most about being stuck at home in Covid for the last two years, and we’re just starting to do...We used to throw these live events at Poshmark where we would have sellers and buyers come in. And I would try to get to at least several of them a year. Initially, I used to go to all of them, and then slowly it became just a few of them.
And those are very organic. If you think about it, customer engagement points, customer research points, the kind of frank discussions you can have when you’re in person, it’s hard to do that. And we’ve tried to supplement a lot of that online. But, to me, that connection, that ability to have those deep conversations is really, really learned. Because sometimes you may not even know what the question is, but the way that the person is talking to you, you can tease it out and sort of have that user research. And, to me, observing people, understanding them is the only way to keep innovating, ultimately, because you know, we’re trying to serve people.

Are you planning to bring these live events back?

We just started, in fact, we just started to do that. So, we’ve had a few of them. I actually got a chance to attend one of them in Las Vegas. They’ve had a bunch of them in Dallas. We’re doing one in Miami.
So, it’s fun to see these things coming back. Because ultimately, fashion is about people and “people connections” is why this journey has been so gratifying. And I think all of those things actually coming back now after two years of isolation, is so exciting.