Jeanelle Teves [00:00:00]:
If you're going to foster community, you're going to have one to one engagement with everyone. Not only the macro influencers who share about your product, but the everyday mom out of New Jersey who's saying, oh my gosh, I love this. And just as a brand, if you come in and you engaged with that comment or you say thank you for this, we are so happy to hear the feedback and you're like, oh my gosh, as a mom, like the brand is listening, the brand sees me or the brand is there and those little touches, I'm a huge believer in the 1% gain and, and this notion of compounding effect and all of those small things, they add up and they create brand loyalists.
Intro [00:00:47]:
Have you ever wondered why some brands grow exponentially, building legions of passionate fans that live and die by their logos and some well done? I do all the time. And that's probably because I'm a massive brand nerd. But I believe there's a secret sauce at the core of every remarkable brand. A formula that sparks the growth of passionate communities of superfans, building a business and a reputation that will last for years to come. My name is Paul Archer and I'm a specialist in brand advocacy and word of mouth, having consulted for hundreds of brands on a topic. Hey, it's Verity here, your co host of the Building Brand Advocacy podcast. In this podcast we tap into the greatest marketing minds in the world. They share the exact tactics and strategies used to build the world's greatest brands, dropping actionable insights every brand builder can apply.
Intro [00:01:36]:
We've got some incredible guests coming up sharing insights and tips that can truly shift the marketing landscape. If you want to be the first to hear, make sure you hit that follow button. The more people following the show, the bigger and better we can make it. So if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to follow and spread the word. Thanks again for listening. It really means a lot. I hope you enjoy this next episode. It's time to learn and Building Brand Advocacy.
Paul Archer [00:02:03]:
Hello, welcome back to a very special episode of Building Brand Advocacy. I am in New York with the amazing Jeanelle Teves from Bugaboo, previously of Nike. And we're going to be getting into it and chatting all about some of those tactics that used to that they're using as a brand to really grow the North American market. But also just some of the high level pieces like how is it the comparisons between a massive brand like Nike and the role of that to such an incredible smaller brand selling such a high passion point product like Bugaboo for strollers. So, just to kick us off, Jeanelle, welcome. Thanks a lot for joining us.
Jeanelle Teves [00:02:43]:
Thank you.
Paul Archer [00:02:44]:
Just tell us, give us a little summary. Who are you? How do you fit into the mix? And tell us a bit about the brand for those that don't know.
Jeanelle Teves [00:02:49]:
Amazing. Thank you, Paul. So my name is Jeanelle Teves. I'm the Chief Commercial Officer at Bugaboo North America. That includes the US and Canada. I like to say that I get to wake up every day with the mission to connect with new parents. And being a parent myself, it's a lot of fun. Both of my kids have been unofficial product testers of Bugaboo products.
Jeanelle Teves [00:03:10]:
So they're in all the prototypes and samples and it's so much fun. Before this, I spent almost a decade at Nike. I started my career at Nike European headquarters. I worked in various digital strategy and brand roles before my last role there, which was the general manager of Nike Women's in New York City. And I finally call that chapter the School of Nike. And there are so many fundamentals I learned from that time that I've definitely brought into now my. My role at Bugaboo and being a part of this growth journey that we're on.
Paul Archer [00:03:44]:
Amazing. And before we jump into Bugaboo, I have to just ask School of Nike. I've heard this before as well. Like this, this brand builder training camp of some variety that Nike is like, what is it that you learn? Is it principles or was it a formal education when you know someone's there in front of that? This is how we do brand at.
Jeanelle Teves [00:04:02]:
Nike, it was really working adjacent to world class athletes and then also really incredible leaders. So I really believe in this learning by osmosis and just being in the room and absorbing all that energy. And the best advice that I can give anyone is to just pay attention, pay attention. And that's what I did. I paid attention when I was working on these incredible athlete campaigns. I paid attention when I had the privilege of working alongside really incredible managers who are now mentors and on my personal board of directors. And I think one thing that Nike did really great, and that is the single biggest thing that I took into my role at Bugaboo is constantly putting the consumer at the centre of every conversation. And when I was at Nike, it was the athlete.
Jeanelle Teves [00:04:50]:
We were obsessing the athlete. How can we make the athlete run faster, train harder, or get into the world of sport? Right? And now when I'm at Bugaboo, I've taken that same principle and Every day we're talking about the parent. How is this going to solve the problem of the New York parent trying to get in and out of the subway or living in smaller living spaces or having to take the stroll up, a walk up. I live that life. My first day at Bugaboo was my first day back from maternity leave. My son was five months old and so I was completely ingrained in this mindset. And I think it's still that thinking that I've brought into my role and has really brought a different perspective and flavour and how I've approached this job. Maybe if I were in a different stage in my life, I think what.
Paul Archer [00:05:40]:
Did you actually do to allow that to happen? So I mean it's great saying oh, we've put the customer in the centre of it. But what are the sort of the tricks you've got to try and keep them front of mind? What was it that they did at Nike and also what do you do at Bugaboo that ensures that that is always the case?
Jeanelle Teves [00:05:55]:
I think it's starting off with what is the problem or the challenge and never losing sight of that because there will be different inputs and perspectives as you go through a campaign planning process or a product development process where different inputs will come into play, where people, you'll get these different pools on what is what, what is going to lead the conversation. But it's this reminder around what is the problem that we're trying to solve. So I'll give you a very concrete example. When I came into this role, the first thing that I heard from the team was we are missing a product that grows with your family. Meaning that when we asked American parents in particular, what is it that you're looking for? They're willing to buy a stroller, they're willing to make an investment in a high price point stroller. But they wanted to, they wanted two things. Number one, that it was going to be of the highest quality and two, that it would last them more than one child even if they were the first time parent and they thought maybe I'll have a, a another one, maybe I want to have two children. They didn't want to have to rebuy the product.
Jeanelle Teves [00:07:00]:
So okay, that's the challenge. Currently our strollers, they're great innovation but for one child, how do we create a modular design that you buy it as a first time parent but then you can add a seat and then in the future push two children. That was the problem that we had to solve that remained the solution that we had to Find through the several years it took us to design what eventually became the Bugaboo Kangaroo and we, we launched that last quarter.
Paul Archer [00:07:29]:
Nice. How did you actually come to that conclusion though? Like were you running customer panels? We picking up the phone to your customers, spending time with it like. And who was the person that eventually made that call? Which is that this is what we're hearing. This is the thing is this is this. The CEO is getting into the store and just asking everyone who comes in. I'm always fascinated about how that information from real customers transfers because particularly very, very large organisations, it's just like oh, this is what we're hearing is because they've had some market research company do all these things and they get these strange secondhand conversations that don't necessarily reflect what actual customers are doing. And my opinion is that marketers have this weird aversion to actually talking to their customers that they feel scared of them. It's just all we're marketing, right.
Paul Archer [00:08:17]:
So we do one to many. There's salespeople called pick up the phone. We're not that we do one to many. We'll send an email out to a thousand people with a really easy to manage and a quantifiable sort of questionnaire that people can do with drop down boxes and I think you really get the tune of it. So how did you guys get to such an incredible insight like that?
Jeanelle Teves [00:08:37]:
I would love to tell you. It was this playbook of complex strategies and ideas and that we worked with this survey or we did this agency or there we had all of, we had a panel where we invited people in. It was as simple as, as listening on social media and going into your comments. So two things. Social media. There is no hotter hotbed of information than a Facebook mom group. If you just go in there, so much information, so much opinion, but you will get a real grasp if you're in the parenting and the baby space of what is important. If you go into those groups and you just pay attention.
Jeanelle Teves [00:09:14]:
So social media, if you're a small company, you're a growth company or you're a large company, it doesn't need to be that complicated. It's right there in the comment section or in your DMs. So for social media, the second thing that we did is change the way how we worked with customer service. This customer service team is at the forefront of the conversation with our consumers. So our service team actually funnels into our product development team and says these are the things that we're asking for or that consumers are asking for. And it's really as simple as the combination of those two things and themes will emerge. And if you hear the same comment over and over again, that's enough to be an insight which is enough to be an indication of, of what, what your next move should be as a brand.
Paul Archer [00:10:01]:
What do you mean they feed into that they managed by the same person. Like how do you make sure that.
Jeanelle Teves [00:10:05]:
They are actually close to each other organizationally? They, they do fall under the same person. At our global headquarters, from a process standpoint, we have meetings together. So our sales reviews, our biz, our weekly business reviews that we have are not done in a vacuum. It is our sales, marketing and customer service team at the table together saying, okay, here's business. But then also here are the top 10 themes that we've had from a customer service standpoint. This is what people are calling about and everyone's hearing it. The marketing lead is hearing it, the sales lead is hearing it, and the customer service lead are cross pollinating this information. That is one change that we made about a year and a half ago, which has really changed the way we've approached marketing and also the insights that our sales team have gotten before going out in the field and meeting with our retailers.
Paul Archer [00:10:56]:
Incredible. How much do you guys do DTC versus retails? Is it like a, is there a split? Is there a majority of one or the other?
Jeanelle Teves [00:11:03]:
Over 50% of our business is done direct to consumer. So this is a combination of Bugaboo.com, but then also dropship, direct to consumer, Amazon business. So we run a really strong E commerce and direct to consumer channel.
Paul Archer [00:11:19]:
And also in a great way of getting just a real opinion of what's going on when you're not selling through a third party immediate. And you mentioned this, the service team and they're kind of not to get a little bit nerdy here onto it, but like they seem so integral to the organisation. How are you ensuring they showing up? Are they calling a, a toll free number to get hold of them or are they connected to social? So tell me a little bit about how that works.
Jeanelle Teves [00:11:43]:
Yeah. To quote our customer service lead, when I first came into the business and I met with her, I said, you know, tell me about the process and tell me about the connectivity with the rest of the team. And she had said it feels sometimes like we're on an island. And I think that's probably the case in a lot of companies. I don't think it was anything that we were doing wrong, but I think that sales and marketing churn out and run these deep processes together and services sort of answering the questions or the unhappy customers or where's my order kind of thing. But it's so much more than that. So what we have changed is first how we meet together as a cross functional team. Every week.
Jeanelle Teves [00:12:29]:
My sales lead, marketing lead and service lead and myself are meeting and taking an audit around, okay, how, how is business this week? What is planned for the next three to four weeks? And also should we be changing anything based on what our consumers are telling us? So quite literally I say what are the top five questions that you, that your team has gotten this week? And we'll, you'll see trends emerge. And we're like, oh, I would have never have thought that that was unclear to the consumer. Let's create a piece of content around that because then that will do two things. One, that will reduce the number of questions that you're getting, but then also two, that will help position and answer the question that a lot of other parents probably have that are just not taking the time to email or call in. So our content plan is informed by service by our customers.
Paul Archer [00:13:28]:
Sorry, like an example of one of the questions that you actually brought up.
Jeanelle Teves [00:13:30]:
Yeah, sure. So one of our latest stroller launches, one thing that we were really focused on was talking about the folds. The Bugaboo Dragonfly has an incredible fold, innovative fold, nothing like it on the market. So we were creating, our marketing was around the fold and this innovative fold. And what our customer service team had flagged was here in America, I'm not sure if also in the uk you cannot bring a baby home without a car seat. And so we were getting all these questions around, do I need to buy. I like this stroller, I get it, the fold's great. But do I need to buy adapters to bring my baby home? Does because I have the car seat.
Jeanelle Teves [00:14:16]:
What car seats are adaptable to this stroller? And there was this missing piece of information around how to connect in our turtle Turtle air shield car seat in with the stroller and how you did that. Because as a first time parent, you're like, do I need adapters? Do I not need adapters? Are there adapters in the box? Are they extra? How do I put the adapters on? I'm really intimidated. I need all this stuff. And so then we started creating content around the configuration of our car seats with our strollers. And then we saw that in the numbers, our bundles went up. Car seat and the Dragonfly sales together went up and so it's just those little insights. I would have never have thought of that. I was so focused on what was important to us, which was this incredible fold that actually the question was about the car seat with, with, with the stroller with amazing fold.
Jeanelle Teves [00:15:08]:
So those things. And also with the rate of organic content, you can take those insights and churn out a piece of content the next day or the next hour, you're able to react. You don't need to get a whole team and a whole agency and recreate an entire campaign. You can just take this insight and plug that into your content creation process and go, that's amazing.
Paul Archer [00:15:32]:
I'm really excited about how consumers are also going to be picking up the phone a bit more or metaphorical typing into it once they realise there's often an AI at the end of the cook. Because then they'll be like, oh, it doesn't really matter, I'm not going to bother them, like, how does this work? And they can ask all of those really dumb questions that I don't know about you, but I would often not call support to do because, oh, I'll figure it out. I'm a man, you know, I don't need the menu, the manual. People are like, oh yeah, how do I do this thing? And, and actually the amount of information that brands are going to be able to get of, like, real problems that people are getting with the product is certainly going to be surface. So I can see you guys as such a well positioned place for that to, to happen.
Jeanelle Teves [00:16:12]:
Yeah. And I think, I mean, one of, one of the things that we try and do of the highest quality and Bugaboo's NPS is one of the highest in the industry, is because if a new parent is calling in, that is not, that is not a situation to be treated lightly. They have, this is a new parent that has a lot of questions. They're entering a new phase of their life. They have not slept, they're a little bit nervous, maybe they're on the way, maybe they're about to have the baby soon and they have questions. So we prioritise response rate, response time, try and keep that under a day or two at the most so that we can get back to this new parent that's about to enter this new point in their life. And then Also we have FAQs, so we have usually the same themes that pop up so we can get back to them quickly, we can give them the information that they need, we can problem solve the question or the topic that they have. But yeah, Service is such a big part of our go to market process.
Paul Archer [00:17:13]:
Do you have to position bits of content in a different way depending on the gender? How much is the father involved in the buying process of a primate in what you're finding? I'm sure you've got tonnes of research on it.
Jeanelle Teves [00:17:25]:
We speak to the parent because modern families look different now. And so I think it's been the belief and it's certainly the data shows that it has historically been the mom making most of the decisions. But now what I love to see is that dads, millennial dads even, I'm sure this will come in the next generation of parents to come with Gen Z are becoming more and more involved with family roles. Big decisions like stroller decisions. So we speak to the parent and also our strollers solve problems for both the mom and the dad. So I'll give you a very specific example. The weight of our products is something we're constantly obsessing. Can we.
Jeanelle Teves [00:18:06]:
Is it light enough to carry down the subway steps for her? For the mother who you know will want. Who cares a lot about the weight of the product. Our handlebars accommodate really tall parents, men. And so when you're pushing the stroller, their legs aren't running into the wheels which can. Which is feedback that we have gotten from fathers in the past. I have a Dutch husband, he's 6:1 and he. Before we had our bugaboo, he really struggled being hunched over. Our previous brand stroller that was made for a shorter individual.
Jeanelle Teves [00:18:43]:
I thought it was great. It was fine. I was really comfortable. But he felt hunched over every time he was pushing our children. So we take into account mothers and fathers when we're designing our products.
Paul Archer [00:18:53]:
And do you have to position marketing in different. You said that you do it to the parent. There aren't any particular kinds of strands that you're learning that you have to have. You have to target particular content to the male demographic. The fathers versus mothers. Like it's all kind of part of the one and the same.
Jeanelle Teves [00:19:07]:
It's one and the same. And we show in our campaigns. We have both mothers and fathers. We have different expressions of the modern family, but it's less about the gender and gender roles and preferences. It's more about, okay, what does the parent care about? They care about first and foremost in North America, in every country, by the way, they care about safety. Ranks the highest second in North America. They care about quality. And so we are constantly looking to.
Jeanelle Teves [00:19:36]:
Awards and accolades really matter because there's sort of that third party stamp. And I say this humbly, but anytime Bugaboo enters into a design award submission, we have such a high rate of winning those awards. So for example, the Bugaboo Kangaroo just won this very coveted international design, the red dot design. And so that is really hard to do. And so we like to share and show. This is, we think we put our strollers through really rigorous internal standards up to seven times higher than industry durability standards, for example. We think it's great. But here's a third party.
Jeanelle Teves [00:20:21]:
So that's a long way of saying quality. And then the third is value for your money. Value for your money being very important. If you look at countries like Germany, for example, other things will index higher, like design indexes, a lot higher. That makes a lot of sense. As someone who lived in northern Europe for a long time, I understand that mindset. But in America this is what's important to the parent. So these are the questions and what we orientate our content around and how.
Paul Archer [00:20:52]:
Much do the awards matter to the consumer? Because I think we as marketers love, love a good awards. We love to talk about it, love to chat about it from all sides of it. Do you have any feedback that this is part of the trust building process for the consumer?
Jeanelle Teves [00:21:10]:
I think it's additive. I don't, I think it's additive. I, as a, and again, this is going back to my mindset being a new parent. If, if I am considering something, anything, what am I going to do? I'm going to go on, I'm going to go on social media and do my research there. I'm going to Google it and I'm going to read reviews and if I'm deciding between two different brands, it for sure, I think is at that point of consideration where it's, it's additive and it helps. So that is a part of our go to market process and we, we, we do prioritise awards and we win almost all of them.
Paul Archer [00:21:51]:
Nice. Congrats. How do you use advocacy in that, in that piece there? Because you know, in your world there's the mommy blogger space, there's, there's tonnes of opportunity around because buying a stroller, $500 could be, could be a lot more than that, whatever it is, across the board and making a decision on which ones to use. I know that well. Particularly with almost all major parenting decisions, it's a pool of people that have been consulted to try and get that. So do you have any way that you've been able to put your fingers on the scale to drive more of that.
Jeanelle Teves [00:22:26]:
So word of mouth still continues to be one of the top three drivers and points of consideration within the stroller purchasing journey.
Paul Archer [00:22:35]:
Based on what?
Jeanelle Teves [00:22:37]:
Based on our surveys that we run. So twice a year we do do consumer surveys and this helps us keep a pulse on what is important, what features we should be taking into consideration. The consumer decision journey also. So twice a year we run these global surveys and one of the set of questions that we are asking is how do you come to learn about strollers? And so the digital space, social media is number one and the second is going in test driving, still going on a test drive in a local store. And then the third is word of mouth, family and friends. So there is definitely this approach between. Okay, how do we grassroots tap into those communities? I like to think of social media as word of mouth at scale. So an example of this is again how we have doubled down on our social media strategy and when it comes to the influencers that we partner and we work with.
Jeanelle Teves [00:23:41]:
So we encourage them to share about the stroller when we work with them in their voice, we don't give them a set of brand talking points and X, Y and Z and these are the things. But you tell your community and you tell your friends and your. And you use your platform to share what it is that you think is amazing about the Bugaboo butterfly. You can tell that story in a way that is so different than I could ever tell it on the brand side. And we're going to get to the same message but you're going to say it through your, through your way. And we found that to be really successful and then we also really celebrate community. So we've been doing a lot more of these in person activations and events right now in New York, but we're really looking to scale that across other cities, la, Chicago, Miami, where we really bring our communities together. And these can be Bugaboo moms or, or not, but just come together for a celebration for community, for getting to know the product.
Jeanelle Teves [00:24:39]:
And that has really helped, I think bring our brand to life and local communities.
Paul Archer [00:24:44]:
And how do you localise that kind of community language for across social. Because there's two schools of thought and no one, it's probably impossible to prove one right or the other, which is centralise all your social across one single account or versus having more localised territory based accounts. How do you approach that?
Jeanelle Teves [00:25:04]:
So Bugaboo is a global brand. We are present in over 50 different countries and currently we have several different country handles like you said, I could definitely make the argument for having consolidated accounts. One thing that Bugaboo does really well is to stay close to the consumer. So we run a local handle at Bugaboo usa and what this allows us to do is to be really tailored in our approach across North America, specifically. So a majority of our followership is from the us, but then also Canada, we have some Canadian followers so we can do things like share about these community events. So the way that we do that is that we just had one last quarter we launched our Bugaboo Butterfly. It was a beautiful event here in New York City and we brought in a panel, we invited parents to come by and try the Kangaroo. We had little activations for children to colouring books and photo booths and we made it really comfortable for parents to come and enjoy and have some food, but then also bring their kids.
Jeanelle Teves [00:26:15]:
And what we ended up seeing on Social were all these comments saying, like, oh my gosh, this is amazing, but I'm in la, can you bring this to la? And then we can encourage them to sign up and be notified for the LA event that's coming soon. So you take a really local event, you use it to drive signups, you grow your database and then you actually contact those consumers, which we do, and say, hey, you signed up for the last event and now we're coming to your city. We'd love to see you there. And so that way we can take that really tailored approach. It's harder to do that if you're talking to 50 countries. So right now it works, it works really well for us. And we've seen this engagement grow, we've seen our community grow, we've seen such enthusiasm for these events. And I love them.
Jeanelle Teves [00:27:00]:
They're. They're part of. My favourite parts of the job is bringing the brand to life in person.
Paul Archer [00:27:05]:
Amazing. I mean, so like something which you touched on earlier when you, when you. We were talking about how the kind of word of mouth people go out to their various different panels of, of friends and say, and I know this is the case when, you know, when my wife and I had our first child and we're like, oh, what's that one? Oh, that's the thing. That's that brand. Okay, you've got that one there. Talk to me about it. How is it like, and everyone's got things like you can go out the subways, like, can you, can you get, can it go over curbs and you know, or can you run in that? Like, there's all this kind of debate that everyone has and particularly when this, this idea and you always go out to that. But you mentioned almost like earlier that you had a personal board of directors.
Paul Archer [00:27:46]:
And I love this concept. I've heard it from a few people, but I'd love like, just because I think it might be something people can be inspired by. Like, because you've done just incredible things with your career. Like how, how did you form that and, and what role did that play in, in you becoming you, who you are today.
Jeanelle Teves [00:28:03]:
As I have gotten further on in my career, one of the best pieces of advice that I've heard is to collect relationships. And at the end of the day, that sort of relationship capital and that social equity is so helpful as you get throughout your career. Even if you're, if you're listening to this and you're at the very start of your career, do not burn bridges. You never know where your peers, your colleagues, your, your managers will end up. So from a personal standpoint, I have always tried to be consistent and be easy to work with just, just on a really practical level, very simple level. And so when I think about my personal board of directors, they are comp. Prized of managers that have been transformative at these different inflection points in my career. And so they're ones that know my strengths, they know my blind spots, and they're the ones that I call on when I'm facing a challenge.
Jeanelle Teves [00:29:11]:
And I want a safe space to work that through. And so it's a two way street though. It's not that you, it's. Think of it as a bank account. You can't continuously take withdrawals out of your account and expect it to give forever. You have to also nurture it and, and make deposits. And so that's what I've done with my personal board of directors is it's not a big board of directors. You don't need 11 people sitting around at a conference table.
Jeanelle Teves [00:29:36]:
I'm talking like three to four high quality people. And I check in with them like once every six months, once a quarter, if you're really good about it. And this can look like, hey, I saw this, I listened to this podcast and I thought of you, or I was on this podcast and I mentioned you and just check in, see how they're doing. And then when you need those moments of advice, you can very easily call on them. And I'm so grateful. Those people will always be there for me. On the brand side, we also have, not officially a personal board of directors, but we have a collective of influencers that we work with and we, we keep this relationship with them for years and years and years. So it's not just a one off because the, the lifespan of our consumer lasts on average four to five years before they age out and they have, they move on to the next stage of their life.
Jeanelle Teves [00:30:27]:
But it starts when they're looking for a stroller and then as they've gone through having their baby and then their, their child is six months old. It's like, congratulations, baby's six months old. How are you doing? How are you feeling by the way? We also have an amazing award winning high chair, the bugaboo giraffe and you're starting to introduce solids. We would love to work with you and so you nurture that relationship in the same way. Then we can call on them when we have specials or we're doing special activations or we're having one of these community, community events and we can call on them and they will always show up because we have that standing relationship.
Paul Archer [00:31:06]:
I love that, the similarities and I love the way that you've managed to kind of condense it down into your own life. But actually then show that that is from first principles. That is how brands are built. Like, you know, like CRM or even say, oh, it's a database. I'll just bombard them with more things and offers. Try and buy stuff. It's just how it's done badly by, by most marketers and immediate. Yeah, exactly.
Paul Archer [00:31:29]:
It's just, oh, you're trying to sell me so more discounts. Buy our stuff, buy our stuff. It's like anytime you have a conversation with someone, they just talk at you. It's not how you build a relationship. And that term of it's like a bank account, you can't withdraw unless you deposit. It' important for individuals but also that's how you do it. Customer relationship management. And every single touch point you, you talked about there around, you've done that sort of that, that store activation or that, that product activation.
Paul Archer [00:31:57]:
And someone on the other side, you're like, okay, we'll get your information so we can actually show up and we can give you something, we can invite you to a thing. We can actually be more than just a take, take, take. And I think that is so fundamental to driving word of mouth. That moment of like, yeah, I do it all driving just favours, you know, you don't like from that board of directors right the way down to the consumer side of things.
Jeanelle Teves [00:32:17]:
I think one of the things that we've transformed and that we've done over the last years is we, every brand says this, let me expand. But we've really built a community and we've moved from this mindset of we have consumers, but actually creating almost thousands of brand ambassadors in the way that we've done that is now when you think about our social media team, you have a typical marketing team. We have someone whose sole role is to engage with people on social media. Every comment, every mention. Because as a brand, if you're going to foster community, you're going to have one to one engagement with everyone. Not only the macro influencers who share about your products, but the everyday mom out of New Jersey who's saying, oh my gosh, I love this. And just as a brand, if you come in and you engage with that comment or you say thank you, thank you for this, we are so happy to hear the feedback. And you're like, oh my gosh, as a mom, like the brand is listening, the brand sees me or the brand is there.
Jeanelle Teves [00:33:23]:
And those little touches, I'm a huge believer in the 1% gain and this notion of compounding effect and all of those small things, they add up and they create brand loyalists and brand ambassadors. And these moms, even well past their stroller ages or stroller years, will continue to talk about Bugaboo as an amazing brand that helped them in their earliest years and helped them with their high chair journey and their playpen journey and their car seat journey. And so it's something that we've really worked on in, in the last few years in particular.
Paul Archer [00:33:59]:
Do you try to make sure that or do you think it's important, I guess actually that someone who runs a company, social media, is from the demographic of the, of the customer, they understand them.
Jeanelle Teves [00:34:11]:
I think it's helpful. It's definitely not necessary that you have to be a parent yourself to connect with other parents. I actually would make the argument that it's helpful to not exactly be the consumer yourself because you will be approaching the brand in a different way. So the person who looks after our content strategy is not a parent. And they're super dialled into trends and trending like what music formats, pillars. And so they, they bring all these fresh, cool new ideas and they can bring the brand to life in a way that is just, I think outside the norm. And I love that you don't have to necessarily. It's, it's helpful to have that resonance, of course, but I don't, it's not a mandatory for us.
Paul Archer [00:35:06]:
That's cool. I just Wanted to go back to the board of directors thing. You said there for a moment. Do you have any tips for anyone who's thinking that they should start their own? Like, should they be reaching out to people? Cold. Do they write a wish list?
Jeanelle Teves [00:35:18]:
No, don't do that. No, don't do the cold. It's like asking someone immediately upon meeting them, will you marry me? The answer is immediate. No. It's. You have to nurture the relationship. I mean, I'll tell you what has worked for me and I've had this incredible opportunity to work abroad, live abroad, work in big companies, work in growth companies. And the first thing that I'll say is, you, you should think about this.
Jeanelle Teves [00:35:47]:
You should think about your own personal board of directors. Your the people that can be mentors to you. For me personally, one opinion is strange. For me, if I've never met someone and they come in and they say, will you be my mentor? I will not be a good mentor to you. I will not be a good board of director. I will be not an additive person on your board. Why? Because I don't know you yet. I don't know what you're good at.
Jeanelle Teves [00:36:14]:
I can't hype you up. I can't be your cheerleader because I don't know you. In the same way. I can't give you critical feedback because I don't have visibility to how you come, how you come across in the workplace. So start with people who know you in the professional sense. And this could look like a former manager. And I wouldn't necessarily advise going to this person, especially if you haven't talked to them in a few years and just say, I'm looking to build my board of directors. Will you be on it? I really wouldn't recommend that.
Jeanelle Teves [00:36:45]:
I would recommend a softer approach by saying, hey, I saw this article, it reminded me of you. Or hey, I listened to this podcast. They were covering brilliant leaders and it made me think of you. How are you? That is an amazing email to receive. And I would be like, oh my gosh, you thought of me. Thank you, I'm great. How are you? What are you working on? And then you start this. It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes a lot of planting seeds before you have the opportunity to call someone a mentor, board of director.
Jeanelle Teves [00:37:16]:
So I would go to your inner circle, someone who has managed you the first time. It could also be a peer, someone who was a colleague or a coworker who is maybe a former work best friend. And they've gone in a different Direction, but you could still ask them for advice. By the way, I have people on my board who reported into me. I still think they're freaking brilliant though. And they. I have so, so much admiration. They don't have to be more senior than me to.
Jeanelle Teves [00:37:43]:
For someone that I call on and say, I am in a pickle. How, how, how, how do you read this? What do you think?
Paul Archer [00:37:51]:
Do you ever to get them all in the room ever?
Jeanelle Teves [00:37:53]:
No, but I should take them all out to dinner and say thank you for everything you've done for me. No, they're. They actually are all unrelated. I have. One is my former. My first manager at Nike. I'm going to send her this as an example. And she was brilliant.
Jeanelle Teves [00:38:10]:
She still continues to be in my ear when I, When I face a challenge. The other one is someone that I just had a great connection with and she never managed me personally, but I've really nurtured that relationship. Anytime they come to New York, I love to have coffee with them and tell them what I'm working on and hear what they're working on. And it's always good to come into those conversations also with a little bit of research on what's going on in the world. Hey, what's your opinion about X, Y and Z? You know, get their read on it. And then the third person is someone who used to be on my team and we just had a good chemistry. And now that they no longer report into me, they're more of a friend. But I call on them when I have a particular challenge and in the part of the business that they were a part of.
Jeanelle Teves [00:38:58]:
And that's really. It. It doesn't need to be that complicated. It's only three. I'm looking to add a fourth if anyone would like to be on my board.
Paul Archer [00:39:05]:
But don't reach out cold.
Jeanelle Teves [00:39:06]:
I don't reach out cold. Don't reach out cold. But I do think it is. It doesn't need to be that complicated. Um, and you also don't want to get fatigued by maintaining all these relationships. It's just a few that help you and guide you. And especially when you do something like join a new company or you join a new. You take a big new job, you get a big promotion, you move to a new city.
Jeanelle Teves [00:39:27]:
Like, it's great to have those safe spaces to work out challenges with, I think.
Paul Archer [00:39:32]:
Yeah. Narrow and deep.
Jeanelle Teves [00:39:33]:
Narrow and deep.
Paul Archer [00:39:34]:
Amazing. So talking of different sort of localization strategies, I'm super interested this from my own company's perspective. As we expand into America particularly is like, thanks a lot. We've been advised by every single person that you should be, you know, dealing with everyone because there's all these people all over the whole country. And we've gone for the narrowest, most targeted strategy of really only focusing on working with brands in New York so that we can build a community and go as deep as we possibly can and really make a mark. Because it's very hard to be, you know, just a drop in the ocean, I think, but you can actually do that. Plus we work with a lot of brands and all the brands are based here, so it makes it an easy place to choose for it. But a lot of people have pushed back on that.
Paul Archer [00:40:20]:
And similarly you're saying that you guys have the localization on the social side of things. Nike were quite famous for having a localization strategy around different key cities as well. And you, you ran one of those, didn't you? Around. First of all, tell us how you what, where you played into that role with Nike and then I'd also love to hear whether you're sort of seeing how community. Do you have a belief about how communities form around like hyperlocal geographies rather than just online? We always know how it works online, but actually how do you think geographies matter into it?
Jeanelle Teves [00:40:55]:
So when I was at Nike, I looked after Nike women's in the New York City and entire east coast territory. And so that meant bringing the, bringing the brand to life through local communities, whether it be brand partnerships, influencers, creators, tastemakers that we worked with, local events, points of distribution. So in general I am a fan of niching down. It is such a noisy world, especially on digital and there's so many people and there's so many different ways that you could, you could spread really thin. I personally am a big fan of creating connections within communities and so for sure I got a firsthand glimpse at that. I have front row seat of the Nike strategy when key cities were a big part of the offence and the role that I played there and then now within Bugaboo, I'm a big fan of doing fewer things better. And so we have also focused on core communities, also taking a look at where our traffic comes from coast coastal cities. And so first focusing there, doing what's, doing what works and doing more of that, doing that better.
Jeanelle Teves [00:42:10]:
So this is where we activate the brand in terms of in person events. This is where you'll see Bugaboo in store windows or shop and shops point of sale. At one point it makes sense to Expand into tertiary cities, which is part two and other parts of North America where we know that there's certainly a bugaboo consumer and we want to focus in on those areas. And I think that really has paid off for us. We see engagement with the brand, we see traffic growth, we, we talked a lot about events already. We see a lot of attendance and enthusiasm and engagement with, with the events that we put on. And so again, personal opinion and what my experience has shown is that really focused on communities and I love this approach. With your expansion from the UK into New York and this focus, I think that really benefits the team and become known for something and that that helps, I think.
Paul Archer [00:43:11]:
Yeah, I think it's that kind of thing of if you can, you know, really reach a point where people look around and everyone's got a bugaboo stroller, it's like, oh, that's what we do. And you can actually get that effect. And I then think that because of social media, if you can get that effect within one city, it can then translate internationally, not just in the whole country, it can get everywhere because everyone's creating content that's then been seen all over the world. And I think it's the same thing. Even when you're looking at selling software to brands, obviously very different. But we work with brands all over the US and we still do and we still will. But actually we're very focusing on marketing activities and building a community in New York because actually we think that that's actually if we have to choose one place, if we want to be focused, this is the best place to do it. We'd love to be able to be further apart.
Paul Archer [00:43:56]:
We're a small team over here at this point in time, so we have to be focused and actually that, that, that hopefully can have the most bang for your effort when you, when you actually can create that word of mouth effect when actually enough folks use it and you can create the general sort of sense that a thing is becoming a thing. We all use this stroller, we all use this software, we all, we all wear this brand, we all love this. And actually that can is often overlooked because it's so easy just to be like, no, there's millions, hundreds of millions of people over here, why would we not try and work with those? But actually that effort tends to, tends to be wasted. And I think a lot, a lot of brands and for business as a whole can learn from what you're saying about being really, really focused.
Jeanelle Teves [00:44:35]:
Right? And I think then you, then you understand and you Create a playbook that, a formula that you can start to, okay, maybe hear the fundamentals and maybe you tailor a little bit for, for the next one or the next city or the next market, the next expansion. But in general, I think it's good to have your team's energy, mind, space, dollars and time focused and oriented in the same direction in a very specific deep part. Whether that's a certain audience, a certain city, one product, it could be a particular service product that has worked really well. And yeah, Bugaboo has become synonymous with up until now, really two things, award winning innovation and design. So, and then secondly aesthetic, this beautiful, really minimalistic, our fabrics, our wheels, the design, both of these things have been synonymous with our brand. And now the third thing is really sustainability. And Bugaboo's B Corp certified. We're the first stroller brand to make a net zero commitment by 2035.
Jeanelle Teves [00:45:48]:
We have changed everything in our materials from our bio based plastics to the types of fabrics that we use, the mattresses that the babies lay on. And so all of these, all of these components are only additive to what we've already become associated and famous for. And so that's the, that's the expansion that we're talking about now. That's the next part, that's the next evolution of the brand. And what we're really excited about.
Paul Archer [00:46:14]:
How do you find that the consumer shows up to that within their, within their buying journey? Because I think it's amazing being a huge fan of B Corp. Movement and have been a part of it since about 2019 and like love that you're doing it. And then also like plastic recycling is really dear to my heart. And like the fact that you guys are making these strollers, what I'm fascinated by is are you seeing that being translated by the modern consumer or are you sort of playing to where you think the consumer is going to be in a few years time? Are we there yet, do you think, in the US in particular?
Jeanelle Teves [00:46:46]:
Yeah. What I really admire about Bugaboo and it's one of the reasons why I love working for this company, is that it's really the right thing to do.
Paul Archer [00:46:54]:
That's the right answer.
Jeanelle Teves [00:46:56]:
No, there's really. No. Yeah, there's. There is. I mean, I don't actually have concrete data or indications because we look at, we typically look at the three that I had talked to you about, the safety, the quality and can it fit more than one child. But it's just simply when we say that we have a mission to empower parents and the future generations of parents. This is the future generations of parents that we're talking about and making better products for the world, for the next generation, for the environment. And so the strategy is as simply as that, that's what our CEO says.
Jeanelle Teves [00:47:37]:
It's, it's the right thing to do. So we're going to do it.
Paul Archer [00:47:39]:
Amazing. And it is the right thing to do. So hear hear to that, Jeanelle. Thank you so much. Where can people find you?
Jeanelle Teves [00:47:44]:
Bugaboo USA is where to find more about Bugaboo or Bugaboo.com to follow on our next launch. We have a lot coming up in the next quarter, in the next year, so you can check us out there.
Paul Archer [00:47:55]:
Awesome. Thank you so much.
Jeanelle Teves [00:47:57]:
Amazing. Thank you.
Paul Archer [00:47:59]:
That was another episode of Building Brand Advocacy, the world's top brand building podcast. To find out more about Building Brand Advocacy and how this podcast is part of a bigger plan for our brand building cookbook. Then make sure to search for Building Brand Advocacy in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or anywhere else that podcasts are fine. And make sure that you click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. Thanks to Duel for sponsoring. To find out more, go to www.dual.tech. that's D U E L dot T E C H. And on behalf of the team here at Building Brand Advocacy, thanks for listening.
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