Using Technology to Redefine the Customer Experience with Alex Back

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In this episode of Rooted in Retail, I am excited to introduce you to Alex Back, the founder of Couch.com. We talk about a lot in today’s episode. You might want to take some notes. This is, you might even listen again. Alex shares a lot of great tips and advice and even tools to help retailers market, to EVOLVE, to stay up to date and to think a little differently as well.

A couple of these strategies that Alex shared, I know that if you take action on, you’re going to be a more successful retailer. So I’m so excited for you to listen into this conversation. Before we dive in, here’s a little bit more about my guest.

Alex Back is an entrepreneur in the ecommerce space and currently the founder and CEO of Couch.com, a new startup focused on solving the biggest issues for consumers in the furniture industry: where the heck to buy a couch? Previously, he co-founded and ran the popular online furniture brand Apt2B, and led it to a successful exit and transition last year.

He’s had a lot of experience in many aspects of business operations, marketing, ecommerce, retail, and management, which makes him like the podcast Rooted in Retail. You can learn more at Couch.com and let’s dive into today’s episode.

Welcome to Rooted in Retail. I’m your host, Crystal Vilkaitis. Here we have engaging and informative conversations with successful indie retailers and industry experts. Together, we learn, connect, and grow. Don’t miss our live after the show every Tuesday night in the Rooted in Retail Facebook group. All right, here’s today’s episode.

Alex, welcome to Rooted in Retail. I’m thrilled you’re here.

Alex Back: Well, Thank you, Crystal. So nice to be here.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah, we’re going to have an awesome conversation. You’re new to my world. So as I was preparing for this podcast, I feel like I was stalking you. I was looking at all the socials and your website and watching your videos and you’re doing some really cool things before we dive into it.

I’d love for you to take a couple minutes, share, because you’re pretty Rooted in Retail. So share about your experience and about your new business Couch.com.

Alex’s journey in furniture retail from selling his first company to starting a new one

Alex Back: I am Rooted in Retail, that’s for sure. I think about things from a retailer’s perspective, like my kids are annoyed by all the little lessons I try to teach them all the time, but I digress. So I got started in retail when I was in my early to mid twenties in the furniture space.

So I’ve been rooted in the furniture retail community for the last, almost 20 years at this point. Basically started selling furniture while I was an actor in Hollywood. I was never like very successful, but I shot a few commercials and was in a bunch of musical theater productions and things of that nature.

So, my side job was selling furniture. And that’s how I worked for a retail store. We had this deal with Costco where we would go into Costco’s and like they sampled the hummus and or show you the Vitamix, they do these like special events. We did it with couches. So that’s how I got into the furniture business, selling couches at Costco while I was an actor in Hollywood.

Crystal Vilkaitis: How fun.

Alex Back: Yes. I met my business partner, Matt, through that process. He ran the store and operation. He’s like my big brother type figure. And we had the idea to basically bring furniture retail to the online space, because back when we were thinking about this and doing this in 2009, 2010.

There really was no independent retailer presence for furniture or any big ticket items online. No one was doing that. Like people weren’t spending a lot of money yet. So we started, we had no idea what we were doing. We got up a website, we figured it out. And luckily the competition didn’t start springing up until three or four years later.

So we have a good amount of time to figure it out. We ended up being really successful. We started shipping nationally. We really kept our finger on the pulse of things. Got a lot of interesting opportunities. We took a lot of them, had to pass on some others, but things just elevated us and elevated us to the point where we were attractive enough to be acquired.

So we sold our company in 2018 to a large furniture chain. And I stayed on for about four years as the COO. We grew the business even more and Apt2B is still like a very popular online furniture brand. I left a year ago to start Couch.com and I’m happy to tell you all about it.

How Alex is helping solve the biggest issue that faces furniture customers and retailers

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yes. I know because Couch.com is unique on what you’re doing and it, I love how it’s very education forward is what I got from it. So give us a couple, take a couple minutes and tell us about Couch.com and what you’re doing.

Alex Back: Great. So the purpose of Couch.com is to solve the biggest issue that faces furniture customers and retailers, which is that customers have no idea where to buy furniture. So that’s the sort of lead question and problem that we’re solving. And then we’re serving a lot of different ancillary problems and solving them, or at least attempting to, but ultimately people don’t know where to buy a great couch.

And there are so many places to buy a great couch. And it’s not just like the places you find on a Google search or the places that you drive by in the mall, on your way home from work that you may happen to see. There are plenty of mom and pop retailers or custom furniture places that are actually affordable.

There are all these different options that are just not present and available. So the big thing that we’re doing is bringing people in. Asking them what’s most important to them about what they’re looking for in a couch. Do you need something right away? Or are you okay waiting? Do you have kids? Do you have cats?

These are sort of determining or lead variables when people make, start their couch buying process. So getting some information from them with an entry quiz that we’re building right now, and then funneling them towards the right retailer or product that they may be interested in, either online with online retailers, or in their local area is really the thing.

And for the retailers, this is essentially an advertising platform for them, right? So they are able to advertise to and present their brand, or their store to this audience of hyper focused, conversion focused couch shoppers.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Love

Alex Back: that made sense.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Absolutely. Yes, it makes a lot of sense. And I think for our listeners, really thinking about and identifying, how can I make it really easy for my customers to find the products that they’re searching for? And you’re solving that in the furniture space and specifically couches, which I love. Now, couches, obviously, are higher ticket.

The unique challenges of retailing big ticket items compared to smaller ticket purchases

Crystal Vilkaitis: You mentioned bigger tickets and a lot of our retailers, they might be a furniture retail. They might be a jeweler and have higher price points, so I would love to know. Because as we were prepping for this, you said that you’ve observed that retailing big ticket items online differs significantly from smaller ticket purchases.

So could you share insight into the unique challenges and opportunities this presents, especially for retailers looking to balance online and physical store sales?

Alex Back: Absolutely. So I think the number one thing that I talk about and I’ve experienced myself is that big ticket items, selling them online is not the same as selling smaller commodity items. Selling a couch is much different than selling a t shirt. Because if you think from the customer’s perspective, it’s still sort of the same, even though they’re shopping online and it is so easy to spend a lot of money very quickly with just a few clicks.

We all have done it probably at this point once or twice, at least. It still takes the same thought process and comfortability level to get to the point of conversion. I know this, I have data to back it up. I’ve lived this life. I know how hard it is to get someone to spend an average of two thousand dollars on a purchase online.

The conversion rate is much lower. It takes a lot longer to do it. And I think the first step that I would take as a retailer selling a big ticket item is to really own and lean into the fact that this is a high consideration purchase, whether it’s because of the price point or in my case, because it’s something for your home and it’s very personal to people, they’re going to think about it for a long time.

So you have to make sure that your marketing and your just general approach to retailing is set up for your specific type of business. I think the biggest pitfall people fall into is just ” Oh, I see this other website. I’m going to make a website that looks like that. It looks the same. Mine should do just as well.”

But the fact is you have to, really, just like you would in any retail store, you have to merchandise it. You have to think about exactly the psychology of the customer. And it’s not that different for an online customer. It’s the same person.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah.

Alex Back: You know,

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah. It’s very true. Well, I even had a few episodes ago. We had some call-in guests, like questions from our listeners. And one of those questions was from a tea company. And she was asking, like, how do I bridge? How do I sell to my online customers and offline customers? They’re different.

And that was my first question back. Are they different? Do we know for sure that they’re different? And obviously you might have some of these differences, and location might play a big part in that. But I do agree with you. I think that we have to really understand the customer. We can’t be comparing and looking at what other people are doing.

We really have to focus our efforts on communicating to that person and continuously showing up. Because you never know when they are going to be ready to pull the trigger and you want to be that person that’s top of mind and you really built that relationship with.

How should indie retailers adapt their marketing strategies to stay competitive and relevant in today’s fast-paced environment?

Which is a perfect segue into talking about marketing and, especially for retail marketing, it’s evolving rapidly. And especially with the widespread accessibility of internet advertising, influencers. So how should small retailers adapt their marketing strategies to stay competitive and relevant in the fast paced environment that we all live in?

Alex Back: So I think one, it starts with the industry that you’re in. I think really understanding how others in your specific vertical are being successful. And I would talk to them. Like people are actually more friendly, communicative, even if they may be somewhat competitive to you. So if you, let’s say you sell jewelry.

And you see a lot of jewelry ads on Instagram. Getting in touch with a brand that may be in your space and asking them, “Is this working for yours?” You can ask questions. The worst they could say is ” I don’t want to tell you.” So that’s just a quick aside, but I think really taking stock of what seems to be working out there is a good first step.

That being said, and I know from the furniture space, it’s become such a crowded market. Like when Facebook ads became a thing but it used to not be a thing. And then it was. It was like dirt cheap, just like TikTok advertising was a few years ago, dirt cheap. It was like, they just were getting people in and there was no competition.

So these are sort of like all open market, auction based. Google, Meta, TikTok. And so the less competition there is, the less expensive the ads are. The more competition there is, it’s going to be more expensive. So if it seems to be like a saturated place, then maybe go look in some alternative places.

Some of these can be really valuable. Now, I think a lot of us have heard this term of like micro influencer. We also have had a lot of negative stigma attached to the term influencer. But the micro influencer is a good example of someone with a smaller following that may be more dedicated and can actually push conversion to your product.

Another way, just something that I think is going to boom huge in the next year or two. And it’s been growing so rapidly is affiliate marketing. And that doesn’t mean just working with influencers, but rather people who have a following, who have a blog, who are content creators, they’re always looking for content and they can generally work your brand or product into what they’re doing very easily.

And it’s performance based. So when you set up with an affiliate, you’re essentially paying them for only for the traffic that they’re sending you to your website or store. Or a commission based on sales that they have helped to generate. So these are cash positive ways to to do marketing without gambling so much that can pay huge dividends.

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for almost a decade, and I think it’s an amazing way to effectively and strategically scale your advertising efforts.

Crystal Vilkaitis: I love that you said that because I don’t think a lot of our listeners are thinking about affiliate marketing. And we do talk about those micro influencers, but it’s so funny because we’re recording this on March 8th in two weeks of this being published. We’ll go another episode, but I just interviewed this morning from Wade Tonkin, who runs the affiliate department at Fanatics, which is one of the largest affiliate programs in the world.

So anyone listening to this, and you’re curious about affiliate marketing, Alex is giving you gold right now. That is such a good tip that we need to understand how that could really help support our business. And it can help a lot of different types. It’s not just furniture, and so I love that that’s one of your tips. I think that there’s a massive opportunity and our locals and our independents can actually be a big part of that and take advantage of that opportunity.

Alex Back: Absolutely. So there are other like affiliate marketing has EVOLVEd to the point where even brick and mortar focused brands and businesses can participate. There’s tons of tracking software for retailers to use, I know, because the company that purchased mine, that I worked for four years, they use this they compensated some advertising partners based on store visits.

And that’s a way that you can optimize your Google advertising too. It’s not a perfect science, obviously nothing is, but there’s also just CPC based, cost per click, based traffic to your website or to your store locator on your website that you can pay for affiliates who are monetizing to send traffic to you.

So there are opportunities there. I do want to say one quick thing though, cause you mentioned Fanatics. Like as soon as you mentioned Fanatics, I’m starting to think about something else, which is a brand partnership. Fanatics is huge. Okay, like huge company. They’re about to blow up. That industry is crazy right now.

And they’re getting sports cards and all this kind of stuff, but I feel like Fanatics and Couch.com could be like a great partnership. Now, Couch.com is just starting. I don’t have too much to offer, except we’re a nimble partner. We’ll give them great content. We could do something super fun and make it super easy for them to promote something to their audience.

So I’m already thinking about brand partnerships, which is something that smaller retailers and independents should really be thinking about. How can you use another brand’s platform to elevate your own? You offer them something and they give you something in return.

Crystal Vilkaitis: I love it. I think that we can leverage other people’s audiences and leverage other people’s connections and there’s so much opportunity. I think that when you have a brick and mortar, we can sometimes just keep doing what we’ve always done and not EVOLVE, and I have a conference called EVOLVE, and there’s a reason to that.

Alex’s advice for retailers who want to start exploring brand partnerships

Crystal Vilkaitis: We need to EVOLVE. We need to adapt and things like this with affiliate marketing, our micro influencers, the brand partnerships. That’s a totally different way of thinking. Alex, is there a tip that you would have for our retailers that are like, oh, tell me more about brand partnership. That’s interesting. How could they maybe get started exploring that option?

Alex Back: So one way, first of all, I think just literally reaching out to another brand, and that could be, let’s take it like super micro level. I have a neighbor of mine has like a very popular gift and apparel store for women. That’s been around forever. It’s old school, but she’s on this one retail strip in LA where I live.

And there’s not that many retail strips here. Everything’s pretty fragmented. And I think about like always, why not partner up with the pizza place? Why not just go down the street and talk to the ice cream place. Every time you buy something here, you got a free ice cream. Every time you buy an ice cream, you get a little something here.

That’s the type of old school handshake, let’s help each other mentality that I think does translate to something even as big as Couch.com reaching out to Fanatics. It’s really just this give and take thing. If you can get access to the individuals who may be in a decision making position, if you have a good pitch, you can probably m ake something happen, but I do have one specific tip.

We, in my former business and in Couch.com, we’ve used contests and giveaways. Co-branded giveaways that are really effective at bringing in a lot of users to your website and collecting a lot of email addresses and phone numbers. Mind you, these people are signing up to get something for free.

They’re not necessarily interested in your product or service. So it’s a volume play. But I’ll just share some numbers to get people interested in this. We’re on this platform called Dojo Mojo, and we’ve done a few branded giveaways since November, and our email list is around 75,000 people. So it, yeah and they’re opening emails, they’re clicking, they’re engaging, not at a rate as the people who’ve come in organically.

But it’s still really a valuable audience. And all we did was essentially just partner up with a few cool brands, and we all spray to our email lists that we’re doing this fun co-branded giveaway, create a little buzz about it, all these people sign up. And then we all share information because all the people who are signing up agree to receive marketing from various places.

Not my favorite marketing practice, but it’s definitely very effective.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Well, I’m such a believer of testing. And so I think that there is such an opportunity to test something like that, where you are doing giveaways. And I know some of our retailers are doing this, and I’ve heard the feedback. Some haven’t gotten the best leads from it, but here’s the thing. Definitely not all those people that join the email list are going to be customers of yours.

They’re trying to win something for free, but let’s say that it is Couch.com and I am in the market to buy a couch. And so I’m like, of course, I’m going to enter to win. What if I win? But now I am still a hot lead. I entered because I am looking for a free couch. And so the key here is that you’ve got to keep connecting and keep talking to your customer.

And a lot of our independents feel like they’re bothering their email list. So they won’t send emails and they won’t connect with them. But the thing is these big boxes. And I’ve seen it, they will email every single day and people stay on the list and stay engaged. So there’s a very good chance that somebody is listening to this right now being like, they’re that person.

They don’t want to be sending. Alex and I are telling you, you’ve got to collect the email. You got to stay in contact. You see it in the furniture space, right? They email every day. Okay.

Alex Back: Every single day. And you say big box, if you sign up for Pottery Barn emails, you’re going to get the same email every single day, more or less. Their strategy is clearly just send. Now they have, because they’re such an established brand, they have a great sender authority.

Email platforms like Google and Yahoo, they’ll favor those. So we do have to be careful about what we do. We can’t just be sending emails willy nilly. But all I was going to say is let’s take our emotions out of it. Yeah, no one likes to be sold to, no one likes to be bothered, but look at the data.

If the customers are opening it, if you have a good open rate, if you have a decent engagement rate. Try doing more. If that decreases, then stop. If it doesn’t, then keep going. And it can be as simple as that. If you remove your emotions and take your brain out of it for a minute, just really focus on the actual results of what you’re doing.

It could be very helpful.

Crystal Vilkaitis: I agree. That’s actually excellent advice when it comes to marketing of really taking your emotions out of it. We want to appeal to the emotions in our copy and imagery, but we want to look at the data.

How Couch.com is addressing the gap between brick and mortar and online search for furniture commerce

Crystal Vilkaitis: And speaking of data, you said that 80 percent of furniture commerce occurs at the brick and mortar level. Yet 80 percent of purchases start with an online search. This seems like a massive opportunity. So how does Couch.com address this gap?

Alex Back: Great question. And it’s sort of the question of the day. This is what really attracted me to this idea of doing Couch.com, to be honest. And this will resonate with this particular audience that is listening and watching right now. It’s like I was burnt out from customers and from running a retail operation for so long and national distribution, like it takes a toll.

And I decided that I didn’t want that lifestyle anymore. And yet I have so much experience in furniture and I have kids, I got a lot of expenses, I need to make money. So I’m like, okay, what do I do? What do I do? And then I had this aha moment that there’s this entire audience that is being completely underserved in the online space.

And that is the brick and mortar furniture retailers of America. 80 percent of the commerce is done in the retail stores still, as much as we start our journeys online. We get all this on. , get emails every day from Pottery Barn. 80 percent is still done in store. And all those retailers, a lot of them are really struggling because as much as there’s still so much business being done there, they’re losing market share, and they’re also spending a lot of advertising dollars in places that they have no idea what they’re doing because that’s not really the core of their business.

They’re not online marketers and that’s where you have to be right now to get new customers to acquire and to retain. So Couch.com is a platform that is democratizing the furniture industry by offering these brands the ability to have a big presence on our site. So there’s a huge chain on the West coast where I live called Living Spaces.

They do multiple billions of dollars. And they have a nice website, but it’s mostly brick and mortar focused. They really don’t have that much of an online presence as big as they are. They advertise on TV, they do all the local brick and mortar bells and whistles that we’re all used to.

It works. They’re very successful. there’s a lot of opportunity out there to really go after these other customers. And then these mom and pops’ that maybe they’ve been around for 50 years and it’s a second generation business and they’ve just done things the same way and their sales are slowly declining. Having a place where they can have a branded page that’s all about Big Al’s furniture and what they do great.

Right next to a page for Pottery Barn, right next to a page for Wayfair sort of democratizing like these are options that you have as a customer. You don’t have to buy from Wayfair just because they have the most money. You can go to Big Al’s Furniture. There are nice people that are going to take care of you and they sell the best sleeper sofas in Los Angeles.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah, exactly. And that’s the thing, that’s what I love about your model is that it is helping the independents have that online presence because to your point, and I’m sure this across different industries, the stats got to be similar. We’re starting online. We’re doing our research there, but we are still going into physical storefronts and we got to make sure that we’re showing up and we’re connecting.

If we don’t show up, we don’t exist. So we have to make sure that we’re showing up online and the fact that they can be right next to the big box too. But just really how you’re helping the consumer understand what’s best for them, what products best for them, and then they can make those choices.

I think it’s really smart, and I’d love to see that across other industries as well.

Alex Back: Yeah, right? There’s so much, there’s so much of this happening and a lot of online retailers, like purely online, just pretend that there’s no brick and mortar stores in this world that they’ve all disappeared, but that’s not the case. They’re still here. We still go into them. So why not? I really believe in this move towards everything being a lot more omni channel.

And I think that’s what we’re going to see in the coming years because brick and mortar retail, it’s not going to go anywhere. And we’re still around. So we have to really mend the two mediums together, the online and the brick and mortar.

The strategy Alex recommends retailers use AI to personalize the customer shopping experience online

Crystal Vilkaitis: Absolutely. All right, let’s talk about AI because AI is revolutionizing the shopping experience. And especially with big ticket items, but I feel like across the board. And so can you share examples of how Couch.com is utilizing AI in this way and discuss the potential impact on the retail industry at large?

Alex Back: Yeah, absolutely. So we see a big opportunity. Everybody sees a big opportunity with AI right now in various ways. And I think it’s at this point a year and a half into, it’s like a huge boom. I think it’s all affected all of our lives in a positive way, at least in a small sense. And I see a big opportunity for us to really make the customer buying journey a lot more pleasant and easy for buying a couch.

It’s really difficult when people dip their toe into buying furniture. They realize Oh, wait a second. How much space do we have? Oh, is this going to be okay for my cats? Oh, I have to wait 12 weeks. There are all these different variables. So when you have something that’s very complicated to buy or even like you see it a lot with skincare products, they’ve been doing this for years.

There’s this idea of bringing people in with a quiz. Getting information from them and then offering them a personalized journey based on their skin tone or their preferences, because it’s so nuanced. It’s quite similar to furniture and that like their couches to some people that may like, yo, this couch looks like that couch, but there’s so many different variables, the seat depth, the height, the, everything, the material.

So getting information from customers using an AI powered quiz, and something very easy and conversational, is I think the key to making customers feel more comfortable and ultimately will reduce the amount of time that it takes for them to convert.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yep, and that is another piece of gold advice because I am such a believer of the quiz. We want what’s best for us. And depending on your industry, sometimes that’s really hard to self identify. So if you have that quiz, it feels like a next level of service. Like you’re really getting to know me so you can deliver results that are based for me, we feel special.

I just feel like that’s a nice enhancement to the whole working with your customers. And I don’t see a lot of independents do this. I don’t know about you, Alex. I’ll see it for some big boxes, but it’s so something that brick and mortar independents can set up pretty fast, post on social, send through email, have it on your website. And really connect and help your customers. Such a great tip.

Alex Back: Yeah. I’m actually on an advisory board of this company that makes quizzes. They’re one of the first people that did online quizzes. It’s called Octane AI. They’ve been crushing, but they like mostly focus on Shopify. So if you have a Shopify store and you want to dabble in a quiz, check out Octane AI. Even if your quiz is like two questions, it doesn’t have to be some crazy thing.

Psychologically, think about it. It’s like the same thing as a salesperson saying, “Hi, welcome in. How can I help? What are you looking for today?” “Oh, you’re looking for bagels. The bagels are over there,” or you’re looking for pizza. “The pizza’s over there.” Customers then feel like they are having at least an experience that is catered towards what they need.

Psychologically, it makes them feel like they’re in the right place to get that bagel or that pizza just by someone saying, “Are you looking for bagels?” “Yes.” “They’re over there.” People like to be directed, especially when they’re buying difficult products or searching for a gift or whatever anybody sells.

Even if the quiz is just, what are you looking for? What type of style are you interested in? And that’s it. And then you filter results based on. That just psychologically, I think the customer is going to feel like they’re being really well taken care of.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yep, I couldn’t agree more. And then I think then you’re building that lifelong relationship. They might even be purchasing more. So you’re increasing your ticket item there or the average sale. There’s so much to that.

What future trends does Alex foresee in retail as AI evolves for big-ticket items?

Crystal Vilkaitis: Now as AI and other technologies continue to EVOLVE, what future trends do you foresee in the retail industry, especially concerning big ticket items?

Alex Back: So one, that’s a great question because as I said earlier, like big ticket items are different and you have to really consider the customer’s mindset when buying a big ticket item. And I also said this before too, the conversion rate for big ticket items online is drastically lower, like drastically, like one 10th at times of what it is for smaller ticket items.

So you think about that and you think about the why in the furniture space, I think a big part of the why is that people can’t see it in person or feel it or touch it. The feeling and the touch it is something that can be addressed in certain ways, like sending fabric samples or wood samples in our industry.

Physical catalog, just having a physical touch point is generally helpful, but from a technological standpoint, being able to visualize something in your space makes it so much more real. Visualization tool, I’ve had my finger on the pulse of this for a while. I’ve worked with various technology partners over the years.

I’ve worked in the furniture space to help people see couches and dining tables and beds in their actual rooms. This technology has been evolving, 3d technology first, and it was augmented reality. But now with AI, we’ve taken like a major leap forward. And if anyone wants to play around with it, it’s very cool.

On Wayfair, if you look for it, they have this tool where you can just upload a picture of your room and you click on a few things, like what style you like or whatever. Then it shows you a picture of your room with completely different furniture. It’s still your room, it looks exactly the same.

Everything’s realistic. It’s not like a cartoony image of it. It looks it’s totally real, and then it shows you the products that you can buy next to it. So like seeing a realistic image of new furniture in your room, replacing your current furniture, that’s not something that existed until six months ago. So where it goes from here, I couldn’t tell you, but the visualization aspects, we have these crazy, VR headsets now, like it’s really there’s going to be a big unlock for visualization through AI.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah, it’s pretty nuts how good it’s getting. Like I feel like when it first rolled out, it was kind of clunky, it was still kind of cartoony and now in months it just has completely gotten so good. And I feel like it’s only just begun. So I feel like there’s so many opportunities and those are really great points, especially with big ticket.

Seeing those in our houses or on our bodies. I feel again, I’m using the jeweler example, but trying on rings and seeing how those things look. Alex, do you have a website or maybe a couple that you like or recommend to help retailers generate some of those AI images or those experiences to create a room where they can then put their products in?

Alex Back: I’m actually partnered with this one application that does this awesome room scanning part of it, and then you can put actual products in your room. It’s not as like visual as what I just described. It ‘s more like 3D and very spatial. But it can give you an idea, maybe, and inspire you about to find other tools that are specific to your industry.

I think you want to find a partner that’s for your industry. I know this because I worked with an augmented reality partner that did an amazing job with floors and flooring and textiles. Like they crush, they were amazing. And they were like, “Oh we would like to try furniture.”

And it was like a little bit difficult. If they focused on furniture, I think we would have just knocked it out of the park. So let’s keep using jewelry. I would really look around like jewelry AI, like all these companies are spending a lot of money to advertise to you.

So if you start doing some searches, I bet some opportunities will pop up, but this application that I’m referring to, it’s called Realize Design. And it’s an iOS application for your phone. It’s so cool. I think it will give everybody some inspiration about what they can do, and we’re going to be doing something with them. And we’re gonna have them heavily featured on Couch.com.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Very cool. Oh, I can’t wait to check it out myself. Awesome, thank you for sharing that. That’s cool.

How Alex believes retailers can adapt to fast-paced technology shifts to maintain or increase your market share

Crystal Vilkaitis: Okay, so for retailers struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in the market, some of these that we’re talking about right now, what advice do you have to help them navigate these waters effectively and maintain or increase their market share?

Alex Back: Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me, as someone who ran a small business was just being open to opportunities and seeking them out and being open to them. And I’ve been doing this, I’ve been talking to a ton of people over the last two months and the amount of opportunities that have come my way for Couch.com is immense.

Only because I’ve offered my time and wanted to chat about retail with a very interesting, knowledgeable person or whatever it is like these things really help. So I think getting out there and not staying insulated is really important. The other thing that’s in the same vein is just staying connected to what’s going on in retail and in the industry.

Like you can catch on to some early trends by just reading some articles and things like that, like I subscribed to a really cool newsletter. It’s the acronym TLDR; too long, didn’t read.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Oh, nice.

Alex Back: TLDR like marketing, TLDR Founders. And it’s like one of these digest, like theSkimm does for like actual world news and things of that nature.

You subscribe to the right online publication. They’ll send you an email every morning. You just go through it while you’re having your coffee. And if there’s an article there that interests you about, if you’re thinking about doing TikTok ads, and it’s about TikTok ads, just read it.

I do this every single day. I devote the time to doing it. And what I do is I have this other app that I use too, that reads it to me, because I don’t like sit there and read for very long. So when I’m exercising or with my kids or driving somewhere, I’m listening to business articles all the time about marketing, about retail, and just keeping my finger on them. I’m crazy though, I’m not saying everyone needs to do this. This is what I enjoy. So it’s been very helpful for me.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah, those are great tips and I’ll have to check out Too Long, Didn’t Read that’s hilarious, I love that. That is really good, that’s a good tip.

Alex’s resilience round

Crystal Vilkaitis: All right, Alex, are you ready for the resilience round?

Alex Back: I am.

Best business book

Crystal Vilkaitis: All right, let’s do it. Best business book?

Alex Back: The best business book is called Becoming Trader Joe. It’s about the founder of Trader Joe’s and the entire title is Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys. If you’ve ever been to Trader Joe’s, many of us have, some of us haven’t had the opportunity.

It’s like a different kind of supermarket experience. It’s a different vibe, and hearing the origins of that and how this particular man was a David to the many Goliaths in the supermarket and wine and cheese industry, whatever they do was really interesting.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Oh, very cool. I love Trader Joe’s, I have to check that book out. That sounds very interesting.

Alex Back: very cool.

Best retail technology

Crystal Vilkaitis: Cool, okay. Best retail technology, like an app or software?

Alex Back: So this is basic and we’ve gotten pretty detailed on a lot of things. I just really, really believe in the Shopify platform. It was transformative for my business. And again, it seems generic and a generic take, but I would say I believe in it so much that if you’re not operating on Shopify, I would really consider replatforming.

And the reason is that they are everybody, the e commerce and just retail ecosystem is focused on Shopify first, almost. Now Big Commerce is up there too, but Shopify is so easy to use and there’s access to so many amazing tools and widgets that are literally just click a few buttons and it’s there for you and it’s up and running, it’s intuitive.

It’s for the every person and not for the tech nerds only. So that’s honestly the best tip I can give is that if you’re not using Shopify, really consider doing it.

How do you keep up with the ever changing retail landscape?

Crystal Vilkaitis: Completely agree. Love Shopify. Now, we already talked about this, but maybe have some additional things to add. How do you keep up with the ever changing retail landscape?

Alex Back: Really I would say just, overall, in the theme of observing, and I know how hard it is. Like I’ve been in the weeds on the day to day running a busy operation. And I just I wouldn’t want to look at retail, I wouldn’t want to look at other people’s ads.

I’m like, I don’t want to, I get all these emails. I just would archive them. Take your time, bite the bullet. Look at everybody else’s emails, look at your competitors, see where they’re advertising, go into their stores. Just observe, even though it’s like a little bit heavy to do so sometimes because it can make you feel like, “Oh crap, I missed this” or “I’m not doing this a good job of this.” It’s really important.

What’s a retail foundational best practice for selling?

Crystal Vilkaitis: I agree. To help retailers be stronger, more rooted in success, what’s a selling foundational best practice?

Alex Back: Yeah. So I have two ave things. One, the first thing is just really figuring out what works. Not getting complacent with it, but don’t be afraid to work something that’s like work at hard, something that’s really working, whether that’s, a promotion it’s okay to run the same promotion 50 different times.

Customers don’t really care that much. They’re happy to get a good deal. Like we sometimes get fixated on these things and like the newness. If an ad is working, I would say tweak it. Don’t revamp it or do it over just because you think you get bored of it or your homepage slide. Like it’s important to keep things fresh, but not as important as we all think.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Ooh. So

Alex Back: yeah. And the other one is just really focused on customers. As in the online world, it’s so easy to see them as numbers or data analytics on a page. I’m super guilty of this. The end of the day, talking to customers, getting feedback from them, selling to them, taking care of them when they buy something. They’re people, you’re people, we’re all people. Talk to the customers.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yep, I agree. So good. Absolutely. I recently heard P2P, people to people. It’s no B2C or B2B. you know, It’s just, we’re

Alex Back: Oh, I never heard that. I like it, I’m writing that down.

If you had to start your business all over again, what’s one thing you’d do differently?

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah. If you had to start your business all over again, what’s one thing you’d do differently?

Alex Back: I would focus on search engine optimization. This is like something we all have all heard, but if we’re not technically inclined, we’re like, ugh, SEO. And there’s so much of it. That’s like kind of gross. You’re like writing articles that don’t have much substance and just are very keyword based. At the same time, I’ve learned over my career that this is part of the game and it can literally translate to dollars.

Like if you have a page that ranks on Google and people click on it, that’s every time someone clicks on that’s a dollar or $2 of Google advertising that you didn’t have to spend. So if you think about it as a cause and effect, rather than I hope and pray that someday this will be useful.

If you think about it as a true longterm investment, I think it will almost always pay dividends.

What do you think the future of independent retail looks like?

Crystal Vilkaitis: So smart, I agree. Finally, what do you think the future of independent retail looks like? Awesome.

Alex Back: good. I’m very excited about it because I think that, there’s what we’re doing with Couch.com. I don’t think it’s a very unique concept in the sense that, we are seeking to democratize the internet. And we want to bring people in the furniture industry from brick and mortar, who may have a mom and pop shop or, small independent, online retailers, all in one space. AI is, for personalization, going to change the way we search for things and find things dramatically.

And if you have a great product or service and you were set up the right way, if you have a great ice cream shop and AI is going to help people find you because you are doing something really great. And I think AI technology is all about getting to the root of something and really helping people find it.

Not everyone’s going to go after Ben and Jerry’s because that’s like the first five Google results that you see if you’re Googling ice cream. They’re going to find the local places a little bit easier and they’re going to be platforms like Couch.com that are going to be focused on bringing the more independent or smaller players back into the spotlight.

Crystal Vilkaitis: I love it. I so agree. Alex, where can people learn more and connect with you?

Alex Back: Well, I’m a very communicative person. My LinkedIn is very easy to find. You can search for me, Alex Back at Couch.com. And my email address is quite simply alex@couch.com. If anyone has a question or are interested by something we chatted about today. Like I said, I love being out there and talking to people.

I’ve found that it really, it always comes back in spades in some way, shape or form. So please reach out at any time.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Awesome. Alex, thank you so much for your time today and sharing everything that you did. I know my listeners loved it. So thank you for being here.

Alex Back: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah, awesome. Everyone remember that I’m rooting for your success. Have a great week ahead, bye.

Thank you so much for being here. It means the world to me. Don’t forget to join the Rise and Shine newsletter, which is social media news. You need to know sent via email every Monday morning, go to crystalmediaco.com/rise to join. And don’t miss the newest episode of Rooted in Retail, which drops every