Weekly Recap 1: Liquid Death, Holiday Returns, and a Site Launch

Below is the transcription from the third recap podcast episode, hosted by Avex Founder and CEO John Surdakowski. Subscribe to hear more episodes here.

John 0:04 Welcome to the Agency X podcast weekly roundup where I run through some quick updates about what's going on in eCommerce today, as well as a few agency updates about Avex.

John 0:16 Liquid Death, a water brand out of California who started back in 2018, launching with a very creative video to first test their concept, has grown tremendously over the past few years. The LA-based outfit which sells canned mountain water from the Alps, and claims they will murder your thirst, has just landed $75 million in Series C funding. I'm a huge fan of this brand, especially since they have a killer eCommerce stack. And their branding is very cool and very metal. They're on Shopify Plus they use Grin for influencer marketing, Klaviyo for email, Attentive SMS, and they use Okendo for UGC and reviews. So that's a really great stack that they're using. And we're huge fans of all of those platforms here at Avex.

John 1:06 Yoast, the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress for over a decade, if not more, I think for way more because I was using it years ago when I was developing WordPress websites, they're bringing their SEO skills to help Shopify merchants. Yoast announced they will create a Shopify app aimed at helping merchants improve SEO. Personally, I'm really curious to see how Yoast navigates a closed platform such as Shopify, especially since they have so much experience with open source platforms like WordPress, so super excited about that.

John 1:41 This year's returns from holiday purchases are supposed to be gigantic, up to 114 billion in purchases is expected to be returned in the coming weeks, which is up from 100 million last year. UPS said it expects to fulfill a record 60 million return packages during its holiday parcel window, which runs until January 22. The figure is slated to surpass UPS his previous record of 55 million post holiday returns in 2020. Returns can be extremely costly, especially for smaller brands. This is why providing a great customer experience during the buying journey, such as customer support, personalization, segmentation could have a huge impact on your bottom line. When you help your customers find the right product the first time to reduce the chances of a return.

John 2:33 We have a few agency updates happening here at Avex. We're bringing on a few new team members this month, an email marketing manager as well as a junior designer will be joining our team. We're looking forward to them helping out a lot of our merchants in the future. We also have open positions for an account executive, marketing partnership managers, as well as program managers and designers. You could check those listings out at avexdesigns.com.

John 3:00 We also had a really big launch this week too: De Soi, which is a non-alcoholic apéritif brand. It's actually our second apéritif brand that we launched, which is pretty interesting, because there's not a lot of apéritif brands. This one was co-founded by pop star Katy Perry and it's going to make a huge splash. They just launched on Shopify Plus, the brand is a branch off of AMASS, which is another really cool brand. Our agency Avex did the design, the development, the user experience is built on Shopify Plus, and has a really interesting design. So you go check that out. And case study should be live on our website soon. That's all I got for today. That's your weekly roundup of eCommerce and agency news.