Episode 185: Seiya Vogt, VP of Growth at Boxed, on the latest marketing techniques

HIGHLIGHTS

Will Bachman: Hello, Seyia. Welcome to the show.

Seiya Vogt: Thanks for having me.

Will Bachman: Seyia, about once every month or two we’ll get a big green and white box on our doorstep that I can barely lift with all our household supplies coming from Boxed and so it’s really cool to have you on the show. I’d love to hear, maybe before we dive into Boxed, tell us a little bit about your background in marketing and customer acquisition.

Seiya Vogt: Yeah, for sure. I guess we’ll do a little bit of an intro on Boxed a little bit later. I’m the VP of growth at Boxed, and what that really means is understanding … I’d like to explain it saying that I understand every single aspect of my marketing funnel from start to finish. When you distill that down, it’s how does someone to hear about us in the first place, how do they come to our website, and what do they do on our website? Like, what’s the actual customer journey look like all the way down to placing an order and then interacting with them post order. It’s the acquisition, the retention, the life cycle marketing, and then the loyalty of that customer base are all things that I think about.

Will Bachman: Great. Tell us about Boxed for listeners who have not, maybe it’s not in their area or they haven’t used Boxed before. Just give us a quick sketch on what Boxed is.

Seiya Vogt: For sure. I like to explain it as it’s the easiest way to stock up and save your household essentials. We sell things all in bulk sizes straight to your door. There’s no membership fee. In the contiguous United States you get it in two days or less, straight to your door. Like Will was saying, a lot of times it’ll appear in a huge box that you can kind of like lift through your doors just because we sell those like bulk size [inaudible 00:01:46].

You can kind of see us play in the same realm of, you know, the Amazons, the [inaudible 00:00:01:50], the Walmarts, the Costcos of the world. And we get the kind of play in that area, more in like the bulk size goods, but also thinking about how else we can cater to the customer bases. For five or six cities we’ve expanded to fresh. We have liquor in a decent portion of the US as well. Really that one stop solution to be able to buy what you need for your house.

Will Bachman: Am I correct in that I heard that when Boxed got started, you didn’t have like your own inventory, you’d just go to Costco to buy the …

Seiya Vogt: Yeah. Yeah. That is a little bit of an open secret for us in a way. We started, we had a typical startup journey. We started out in our CEO’s garage and he saw an opportunity that Costco didn’t have an online store so, “Why don’t I just figure out the best way to sell those items online?” And that’s really how we started. I think as we matured and grew, we have now facilities all across the US. We wanted to create both our own brands, so we actually have our own private label sort of premium household product brand called Prince & Spring.

We also have now great relationships and connections to all of our CPG partners that if I say names you’ll definitely have heard of them, that help us actually have our own inventory. We’ve kind of done a complete 180 I think of those early stages of our company. But we’ve been able to grow to that stage where now we’re working directly with both sides.

Will Bachman: Cool. Obviously a lot of this would be confidential, we don’t need to get into specific numbers, but I’d love to hear what you can share about how Boxed goes about customer acquisition.

Seiya Vogt: Sure.

Will Bachman: I remember for a time there was a lot of subway ads in New York City. That’s a thing. I’d love to hear the different channels that you found effective and how you think about deploying them as [crosstalk] growth.

Seiya Vogt: You think about like, you know, it’s working in this day and age, right? The channels that I’m going to say, it’s not going to shock anyone. Right? And you need to plan those because honestly the volume is still there. We still do a lot of volume on Facebook, on Google. We have affiliate as a large channel for us as well. And we tried to think of our marketing structure and in two different ways, right?

One is what are we doing on the top of funnel? What are we doing to reach a user for the very first time? They haven’t heard about Boxed. We’re not quite a household name yet, unfortunately. Right? How do you connect with that person, tell them who you are and make that introduction further up the funnel, so then you can sort of drive them to your website for the first time?

And then how do you actually make that close? How do you drive the actual sale? On one side we have what I consider to be top of funnel tactics. TV is a good example. You mentioned the subway ad, we haven’t run them in a little bit, but they were really effective for on the local level. And then we started doing a lot with direct mail as well. That’s actually something that I found pretty fascinating as more of a digital marketer. You don’t expect postcards in the mail to work really well, but when they’re targeted in the right way and when the creative speaks for that targeting, it can be a really effective channel. And stop me if I get too technical here, but one of the things that has really worked well for us is that we will take segments that are our best customers and create lookalike audiences.

And we work with partners in order to send those segments, those lookalike audiences actual direct mail. We kind of know in the realm of who they are, so we can create, like I said, a creative that speaks to those particular segments. And then we can also re-target those folks, too. I can mention a partner of ours called Posty. We also worked with Pebble Post as well. And you can just put a pixel on your website and re-target that audience and have direct mail sent straight to your door because it matches the IP. You have to be a little bit careful here. Obviously you’re not playing with PII, like actual information. But it’s a way in which you can be a little bit more targeted, a little bit more smart than just kind of a spray and pray method of just like, “Hey, can we send postcards to every single address in the New York City area” or something like that. Because honestly, that’s not going to work. It’s going to be expensive and you’re going to target people who probably don’t want anything to do with you or your brand.

Will Bachman: Let me get this straight. This is amazing to me. I’m kind of naive at this stuff, that you can have a pixel on your website so that if someone goes and visits your website, they don’t log in, they don’t make an order, they just check out the website and “Okay.” Then you can say, “Someone from that IP address visited the website,” through your partners connected to actual physical address and send that person a piece of mail.

Seiya Vogt: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. All you need to do, and like I said, there’s a few partners that we’ve worked with, Posty is one of them where all you need to do is put a pixel on your website. It’s kind of like a re-targeting pixel. You can even target people who’ve done certain actions or haven’t done certain actions. For instance, we know if you come to our site whether or not you’ve made a purchase or not. And we can target you accordingly. Maybe you’ve placed a few orders, but we’ve since dropped off, or hey, maybe you haven’t placed an order yet. Those two customers are going to have very different messaging sent them because the activation elements are going to be different as well. It allows you to kind of very granularly drill down into how that segmentation works and figure out the best way to actually go after those customers.

Will Bachman: Talk to us a little bit about, talk to the listeners about the kind of data that’s out there in the universe about us as consumers that that would let you do that kind of [crosstalk 00:08:07]. Maybe you can give me an example.

Seiya Vogt: It’s an interesting point. I think it’s kind of no secret these days that there’s more data about us than we would like to have online, and I think we as marketers like owe it to ourselves but also our customers to think about the ways in which we use that that are not going to be like overly creepy or not going to be too invasive. I think that’s a really important sort of distinction to make because if you’re coming to our site and taking some action, if you create an experience that better speaks to that user, it’s going to be better. If you come to our site and fill out the information and do orders, and honestly this is like for us where at one level, you can imagine where Amazon and some of these other players are in terms of how much they know about you.

But if you can do it in a way that’s very specific and maybe a little bit more subtle than most, it’ll work a lot better because you’re kind of getting past that factor of like, “Oh my God, they’re targeting me or they’re following me across the Internet.” Because we’ve all, I’m sure I kind of felt like that. To give you kind of an example of this, right? We actually in our email have inserted some, what I would call like are more micro personalizations. If you’re on our site and you’ve searched for some items, we may have a model on an email that actually surfaces up the items that you were searching for.

It sounds like, again, it’s kind of simple, we’ve kind of seen this elsewhere, but if you’re not using that as like the hero image and we’re not using that as like the names, your story of what this email is about, it’s more about the personalization within the email itself. We saw that it has over a 100% increase of clicks in that email because again, we’re servicing up the things that we think you’re going to be interested in. I think in that sense, using our data to provide a better customer experience is definitely something that feels right. And it’s something that will allow you to have a better time using our service and our platform than you would going somewhere else that literally couldn’t care about you.

Will Bachman: Oh, sure. In terms of the personas that you talked about earlier, wouldn’t ask you to reveal one of your proprietary ones, but I imagine it’d be like a two income family with three kids, both working parents with this income level or something is probably our good customer because they’re busy and maybe it’s like what’s their political leanings or what kind of car do they have. How many different things would be included in a persona that you would use to create this lookalike thing? What do those look like?

Seiya Vogt: Yeah. That’s a great question. I think it’s going to be a mixture of data that you have and the data that you have to like fill in and kind of understand and there’s far better partners than the one that we may have like internally that can get you those answers, as you said. What kind of car do you drive and all that kind of stuff. We don’t capture that information, but what we do capture is a lot of demographic information about you and maybe the ways in which you use our platform or ways in which people like you have used our platform. For instance, we have a healthy B2B business as well. So like are you a business? Are you an individual? As you said, are you married? Do you have kids? Are Your kids at home? Are they off to college? Are you a high income family or a lower income family?

Those are sort of the elements which from a demographic angle that you can put together to understand who you should be targeting, like what your cohorts are. And then we layer that in with behavioral modeling, too. Like I said, what are you purchasing from us? What items are sort of unique compared to some other people? We’ve had, I don’t know if you’re a big fan of Miracle Whip, Will, but we’ve had a certain, take a minute and save in groups like buy that particular item predominantly over everyone else. We can kind of use those things to understand what your buy rate is, like how often you purchase those items, and be able to surface those up both in terms of like, “Hey, we think you’re going to be running out of this particular item,” but also when you come to the platform, if we think your type right, like we can start surfacing those items to you as well and get a little bit more personal. Like I said, more on a subtle level then on something that’s very in your face like, “We know who you are and we know where you live,” like that kind of thing.

Will Bachman: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about testing, or experiments, or pilots. I’d love to hear how you think about that. It sounds like you’ve probably done some of those just to see if like the direct mail works before you do this massive campaign. How do you think about testing and experiments?

Seiya Vogt: Yeah, yeah. I kind of think in two different ways and to be honest, the piece of advice I can give is that you should always be testing, you should always have some sort of test online. Our testing cadence is every single week that we’re working on something, every two weeks, something may be launching. And we test in a concurrent manner to make sure that we have a control and we have things live. We have a coupon versus a giveaway or something along those lines where you’re testing two different incentives.

I kind of think about it as one is the more tactical approaches, so what are those quick hits that you just want to see whether or not it can increase on that 10% level. And that might be something, like I said, a different offer. We had one recently that was … that we tested that with a $10 off of $50 and we tested that versus a $20 off of $100 and $15 off of $80 or something like that. And what we found was even though you may save more if you spend to that $100 level, that minimum caused people to maybe not want to place with any orders. We had almost twice as many orders, 30% more revenue or something like that, ordering at that $10 off of $50 level. And we saw many customers go beyond that $50 minimum. It didn’t even stop them from purchasing way more products from us. What it did was it just lowered that threshold of what they needed in order to unlock that.

That’s like an example of a tactical test that we would then take and say, “All right, now that we did that, how do we operationalize it? How do we put it into our email flow? Let’s actually take this offer and use this all the time and automate it. That’s like one side and then there’s these bigger swings that you need to be making. Those would be like features or new product decisions that I’m working very closely with our head of product or head of data science on. What are the things that we feel like can really move the needle? And those are just as important. They honestly just take a little bit longer. We’re still in the process of launching a few different features that I would love to share once we get a little bit closer to the launch, but those are things that when you plan it out with your, with the different stakeholders within the team, you have to really understand all the sort of financial elements in there.

Like what version can you show that sort of makes sense from a financial perspective and from a data perspective. But also, really think about how does it resonate with the customer. Is it simple enough to understand? Is it actually something that they want? And when you release those, you really want to release very different variations of it so that again, you can continuously learn and understand what’s working, what’s not working.

Will Bachman: Have you had any surprises with tests or experiments, things that just either failed or just wildly succeeded and just kind of surprised you?

Seiya Vogt: Yeah, I think something that did surprise me is for a loyal customer. So, hopefully people like you, Will. Dollars off didn’t actually matter as much as giveaways did. We went and did some tests between, “Would you want X percentage off or whatever, or do you want a full retail size item that we will ship to you for free?” It’s giving you that more tangible value for it. And for customers who are always going to purchase from us or customers that like may purchase from us on a regular basis but maybe not once a month, it actually activated them way more than just giving them dollars.

I think in that perspective, like knowing how to activate certain customer segments or groups is really important to drill in and really figure it out. Because it’s something that may not be as obvious.

Will Bachman: It kind of almost gets into behavioral Economics. Do you consult with behavioral economists or do you just kind of use gut instinct plus testing to come up with ideas?

Seiya Vogt: Yeah. For the most part, we do. We try to do most of this internally. I’m lucky enough to have a really solid data science team that I can talk to about all of this in terms of modeling and testing and really truly understanding what is moving the needle, what’s incremental, what’s not. And then it’s just about, again, talking to your customer base, understanding who they are, what they care about, what items they need. Thinking how we link up with our merchant team.

We started to see that some of our customers needed some surprise and delight type of item and then we started carrying them. So we started carrying things like Unicorn cereal and Unicorn mac and cheese and stuff like that, because for whatever reason unicorns are in and our customers really wanted to buy it. But you’re not going to really understand that just by talking to outside consultants. I think you’re going to understand that by like talking to your actual customers. And that’s something that’s really vital to our approach as well.

Will Bachman: Yeah. You also wouldn’t discover things like this, do people want a discount or an actual item without testing it and seeing what really works, which is kind of exactly what you’ve been doing. Even giving people maybe like more dollars, it’s kind of they’re irrational because they could use those dollars just to buy the extra item, right?

Seiya Vogt: Yes. Yeah, yeah. That’s right. That’s true. Yeah.

Will Bachman: Tell me about the term performance marketing. How does that fit into what you do?

Seiya Vogt: Yeah. I think I’m going back to what you were asking me about like what channels we use and things like that, I would say that, I kind of mentioned the big three like Facebook, Google affiliate marketing, stuff like that versus say more top of funnel tactics like TV, direct mail. I think performance marketing is all about … many times it’s called like similar phrases about direct response and stuff like that. You want someone, you’re paying for someone to take a particular action. That’s essentially what performance marketing is. I would say for most people it’s going to be placing an order or purchasing or signing up or dropping off the lead. Or some sort of like major conversion action. That’s what you want to set your budgets and set your campaign based on. So for us, it’s about placing an order.

Our Google campaigns are very bottom of the funnel. They’re very … will target certain terms such as, “I want groceries in bulk. I want, you paper towels or toilet paper,” stuff like that. But we’ll also do things like Google shopping where you’re literally bidding for items to show up in search. And when people are clicking in and placing their orders, that’s essentially, trying to drill down that level in terms of [inaudible] and in terms of the other maybe metrics that you want to think about.

Performance marketing is where you’re going to spend that time trying to drill down into one or two major metrics that will drive just pure sales and pure actions into your business.

Will Bachman: And when you see affiliate marketing, could you explain that to me?

Seiya Vogt: Yeah. For us, affiliate marketing is, very simplistically, it’s like our partnership with deal sites and coupon sites and stuff like that. You may have heard of like Ebates, I think they just rebranded to Rakuten, but they’re a great example of someone where you’ll want to go and get a little coupon for and then be able to place an order through our site. But it can be as complex or interesting as working with say like American Express. They have great deals for their members. Or other of our partners such as like a Drop, which is a new app that essentially will give you extra points if you were to shop with us versus say shop on Amazon or somewhere else.

It kind of helps create that loyalty and helps sort of bridge the incentives. But it’s mainly used in this same performance engine. You want to drive additional sales. And that’s where it is drilled down into.

Will Bachman: Tell me a little bit about what an organization looks like, and the skills required to run a growth marketing engine the way you do.

Seiya Vogt: Yeah, so we … I decided to split up my org into three, and if you count sales, into four sort of major sections. Acquisition, marketing, retention, and right now it’s like retention and loyalty is one org as well. And then a third one, which is kind of interesting. It’s labeled as customer growth, but it’s essentially customer journey and conversion rate optimization. So I’ll kind of break those three down. What it really is distilling is the exact customer journey. From an acquisition marketing standpoint, what’s really important is for us to make that first sale, make that first purchase for you. So it’s everything leading up to that first purchase, including like I said, all the top of funnel tactics with like TV and direct mail, all the way down to those performance marketing ones like Google or Facebook.

And then once they placed their first order, from second order to around anywhere above 10 or 100 or whatever is our retention and loyalty buckets. And those are where I said there’s going to be something there where how do we make Boxed a more sticky solution? How do we make it so that you actually want to buy these items? Because at the end of the day if you’re not buying from us, you’re buying these products elsewhere because we sell what you know you need for your house.

It’s really important for email to live there, our CRM, any SMS messaging like re-targeting, all of these kinds of aspects of now you know our brand, let’s educate you a little bit more about them, and let’s educate you about our story. You mentioned the garage, all that kind of stuff. How do you connect with your customers a little bit better that lives within this retention sort of loyalty team?

And then lastly, the customer journey, the customer growth one. This is where all those tactical tests that we’ve talked about are living, which is things like an onsite offer test or … We tried something which is trying incentive offering a for buying … or sorry, getting a 15% off versus getting a free six pack of toilet paper or something like that. Like what actually resonates with our customers on our site. That’s something that for a growth org sometimes lives within marketing. And I found it to be something that I find really important to have under me because I’m trying to think about the entire journey from start to finish. That person in particular works really closely with our product team in order to understand what tests we should be running or how can we better optimize certain pages. And how do we think about visualizing our price or something like that.

Will Bachman: What’s that mean? Visualizing the price?

Seiya Vogt: Yeah, sorry. That could be something like, because we sell bulk size good. If you’re looking for a box of Cheerio’s online, you may see it as $3 or $2.50 or something like that. But we sell two boxes, much bigger boxes, for about $6.70, I think. And when you think about the actual value you’re getting for that box, it’s going to be, for if you’re buying from us, you’ve saved more than two X by doing so, right? But when you sort of land on a page and you see, “Oh my god, Cheerios is $6.70,” you may bounce immediately, because you’re not thinking about the value. You’re thinking about the sticker shock, the actual price.

There’s ways in which that we’re trying to test on site, like how can we better visualize it? How can we better explain who we are quicker? Because you only have, it’s less than a minute, right? Less than 10 seconds of someone’s time once they land on their page for them to just bounce and say, “You know what, I don’t want to buy this.”

Will Bachman: Right. So you have to maybe unitize it somehow and show it versus what’s the price per ounce or something.

Seiya Vogt: Exactly. Exactly. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. That sort of experience of trying to figure out how to retain someone on the site itself I think has to live in this sort of role and in this position. Yeah.

Will Bachman: Yeah. What’s the price per Cheerio?

Seiya Vogt: Yeah. Right, right, right. I get it at that level

Will Bachman: Into basis points.

Seiya Vogt: Yeah.

Will Bachman: Okay. That’s cool. Talk to me a little bit about the retention and loyalty piece. Tell me a little bit about just how that works.

Seiya Vogt: Yeah. So I think it kind of goes back to what we were talking about, like really knowing your audience or being able to drill down who they are and what kind of data you know you have, and how it speaks to you. Because how do you actually operationalize that and then use that, that’ll be your retention and loyalty. We have our own loyalty program called Boxed Up that we give special discounts or special previews or items that other users of our site can’t buy. Stuff like that that may sort of resonate with one group of people who are so loyal to us that they’re always going to buy from us. And how can we just cater to them to have more items that they want to purchase.

How do we better surface up things that are new? That might be something we do with that particular segment versus like, I think nurturing and understanding the customers earlier on their lifecycle is vital. I mentioned that the average vision team mainly works on sort of driving that initial purchase. But afterwards, if my acquisition team is then thinking about that next step as well and linking up with retention, it’s not gonna work, right? Because you can be easily incentivized to drive low quality customers to us. But what’s really important is to be able to link those two together and say, what are the types of people that are going from one to two, two to three, three to a hundred, right? That’s where it is a little bit more about the messaging or understanding what messaging is going to resonate with one segment versus another.

Does Che, our CEO, does his story resonate with one group versus you’re just going to shop with us and get a bunch of deals, right? Those are two very different things, but they’re going to speak to an audience very differently and that’s where you have to combine that data of how people are using your site to testing that different messaging against those groups.

Will Bachman: Let’s talk a little about the B2B side. How do you go about the growth on the B2B side?

Seiya Vogt: I think in some aspects it’s kind of like the perfect world for us, right? Like we sell the essentials that you need for both your house and your office. All those Cambridge supplies plates, towels and toilet paper, and all the snacks that you might need for your break room or anywhere else. It’s about making sure that we have the right items and the right talking points in order to better service those types of customers. Because we get a decent amount of inbound interest and it’s just about routing them in the right way and making sure our team is talking to them in the right way. But how do we speak to an office manager, because that’s who generally we sell to. How do you speak to an office manager who right now is either having to go down to the store and buy all these products and put them out and herself or himself, versus giving them a one stop solution that all they have to do is log in and choose what items they want and get shipped to their door.

It’s like the value prop is already there. So you just need to be able to talk through the pain points, essentially the pain points for that person, and also make sure that we have the items in stock that they need. What we’re trying to do right now is create that one stop solution for them so they don’t have to go anywhere else. They don’t have to buy online at five different stores. They can just come to us and buy everything here.

And I think trying to match what we can have and offer to the actual customer base, that is key to our growth on the B2B side. But honestly, we’re not trying to sell inexpensive SAS software. We’re selling paper towels and toilet paper at the end of the day. I think as long as you can humanize that connection, we’ll be able to link up and work with our B2B customers in the right way.

Will Bachman: Seiya, how do you personally stay current? There’s so many, there’s so much kind of development, and new kind of tools and services available all the time in your space. How do you keep up to date? You go to conferences? Do you just chat with some colleagues that you trust? Do you follow news online or websites? How do you keep up to date to make sure that you’re not missing some great new tool?

Seiya Vogt: Yeah. I think the beauty and as you say, the issue of staying current these days is that things are changing all the time and they’re going to go, kind of going back in like cyclical waves. Would we have said that direct mail is a great way to acquire customers five, six, ten years ago or something? Probably not. It’s something that came back and is at the forefront, due to new technologies that allow you to better target customers.

I think obviously it’s very important. I try to keep up by reading online. There’s different sites you can go to like Growth Hacker and stuff like that. I remember learning SEO, in a lot of ways, search engine optimization on Moz.com.

Will Bachman: Okay.

Seiya Vogt: They’re one of the leaders in the search engine optimization area. I try to read the new content that goes out there. There’s always elements of niche sites that can speak to particular topics that I would say, go out there, find out about, there’s different thought leaders in each of these and sort of follow them. But I think you’re right, going to conferences, speaking to your colleagues. Speaking to other people in this space is vital.

I’ll try to talk to other heads of marketing, heads of growth elsewhere, just to get a sense of like, “Hey, what’s working? What’s working for you? What’s working for me?” Start sharing that because we all have the same issues. And luckily there’s a big enough market out there that we can all learn from and gain and understand and improve. And I think everyone just wants to share their story and share their learnings with the rest of the world. I’ve found that everyone’s willing to talk and have a conversation about it.

Will Bachman: You mentioned thought leaders. Any folks in particular that you follow, that you really respect in this whole space of growth?

Seiya Vogt: Yeah, yeah. On like the search side, there’s a guy named Rand Fishkin, who I think has had a lot of early stage, so he started Moz and has some great stories about building the brand itself, the company itself as well. It’s just like search in general for analytics. There’s a guy named Avinash Kaushik. I don’t know if you’re familiar, but he’s like a great leader and like the analytics space to understand multi touch attribution and stuff like that. There’s people out there that kind of are an expert in everything, which is great. You can always find someone to follow.

Will Bachman: Yeah. I’d like to check that one out. I’m sorry, what was the name of the analytics person?

Seiya Vogt: Oh, Avinash Kaushik yeah, you kind of have to search and maybe spell it out. It’s a little bit one of those more unique names.

Will Bachman: All right. And beyond Growth Hacker and Moz.com are there other sites that you check out?

Seiya Vogt: I would just look up what you’re trying to learn and there’s going to be leaders for that as well. And some of the services out there are really quite good. So like if you’re learning about email marketing, honestly some of these brands have amazing articles about email marketing like Mail Chimp. You can learn a lot just by reading their blog. I really like Unbounce as well. It’s like a service that has a landing page builder and they have a lot of great content about how to create the best landing pages or what sort of landing pages are effective versus others. I think if you find some of these brands, I mean services, honestly they have better content writers working for them than some of these [inaudible] may have.

Will Bachman: Yeah, they can afford it because it’s really building their brand.

Seiya Vogt: Yeah, exactly.

Will Bachman: That one for landing page builders, what’s that firm again?

Seiya Vogt: Unbounce. U-N-B-O-U-N-C-E.

Will Bachman: I got it. So as opposed to bouncing, so you want Unbounce. Got it.

Seiya Vogt: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.

Will Bachman: That’s very cool. And just turning to the personal side a little bit, I’m curious, I always ask guests this, are there any habits that you’ve found really successful? Either ones that you’ve had for forever or ones that you’ve recently adopted that you find just really help on your effectiveness and productivity?

Seiya Vogt: I think as leaders, I think sometimes we can be stretched a little thin or we can be put into … We’re just in meetings all the time. Or you’re thinking a little bit too high level. You’re not thinking, like you said yourself, how do you kind of keep updated with everything.

I think it’s really important to take a day or so, like I try to take a day every so often just work from home, have no meetings during that day and just literally just go through stuff that is interesting to me that I think can help move the business. And more times than not I’ll come up with an idea that I then come back to my team with and say lik, “Hey, you know,” maybe annoyingly so, right? Like, “Hey, can we try this? Hey, can we think about this?” And I think having that time to spend a little bit outside of the everyday hectic bubble can help a lot.

I read, I forget who wrote this, you’ll have to forgive me here, but I read this one article about how someone took a vacation from work by working, right? Like they just kind of gave up their daily sort of their day to day for a week and just spent that time working on other things, and came away with it with a bunch of new ideas and things they could put some action on. And I thought that that was, you know, maybe you can’t get away for a whole week because I know I can’t, but maybe you can get away for a day or two and just think about what are the different pain points in your business that you can grow that are part of, or that are sort of separated from that day to day experience. So that’s definitely something that I try to do on a more or less regular basis.

Will Bachman: Great, great advice. I find for myself that works really well also. And sometimes even kind of traveling and working from the road. Taking a trip and just the new environment kind of helps you kind of lock your brain into some different plane where you come up with some new ideas.

Seiya Vogt: Yeah, I think that’s totally right. Yeah.

Will Bachman: I love that. Well, Seiya, thank you so much for being on the show. This was fascinating to hear about how you’ve been working to grow Boxed and about broader tips about what’s happening in the world of marketing. So, thank you.

Seiya Vogt: Yes, it is my absolute pleasure. It was really fun and thanks for asking interesting questions.