#314 - Scaling Growth In Beauty with ILIA Beauty VP of Digital & Ecommerce, Cherene Aubert

What is up DTC pod? Today we have the pleasure of having Shereen Albert back on DTC pod. Last time we chatted with Shereen, she was heading up VP of, or she was the VP of growth and data at Bobby, which was the really fast growing baby food brand. But since then, she has moved on and is now the VP of digital and e commerce at Ilya Beauty, one of the major beauty brands in the space. So we have a whole lot that we're going to unpack on today's conversation. Specifically, we want to kind of go into talking about what are the differences in e commerce when you're selling different types of products, as well as what are the strategies that Ilya and Shereen are kind of implementing and using today to continue to grow the brand. So anyway, without getting too far into that and spoiling too much of the convo, Shereen, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you just give us an update, tell us a little bit about your background, how you wrapped up things at Bobby, and tell us about the transition into your new role. We're super excited to hear about it.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, first off. And yeah, I've probably spent almost 15 years now in B to C Ecom. I spent a lot of time agency side, and I think that was like a really great way to get exposure to hundreds of businesses. Different sizes, categories, understand exactly what makes a winning business. And that's what really helped me pinpoint Bobby as my career move into the brand side world. They're a baby formula brand disrupting the industry. We grew to nine figures within two from I joined from Series A, we went through series C, we acquired a competitor brand and our own manufacturing facility. And I was driving the growth strategy and data for Bobby and the brand that we acquired.

So it was amazing. Rocket ship. The industry was interesting. Supply was a big limiter to scale for the industry had a national shortage, and that was one of the reasons that they acquired their own manufacturing so that they can continue to grow. And of course, me, I'm like, I want to grow faster. I want to do more. And so I saw an opportunity open up at Ilya, a brand that I've loved for a long time and had been a customer of. And it was like a perfect stars aligning moment.

And I think the core differences between the role that I had at Bobby and the role that I have now at Ilia is as the way that we were structured at Bobby. The growth team was really responsible for growth marketing like full funnel marketing, so paid acquisition, conversion rate optimization strategy and retention. We had like growth creative, which was essentially like the performance marketing creative team, and then we had the data team. So we built the whole data architecture for the business and delivered insights to the rest of the business to kind of support the strategy. So we were supporting marketing strategy, we were supporting brand strategy, retail strategy, and then we had a digital product team that was really owning the site and we were working together, providing insights for them to implement. In my role as VP of e commerce and digital at Ilya, it's a bit more of a consolidated role. So I'm responsible for the site itself, the product management. So not only building the strategy but implementing it.

We have customer experience on our team and the rest of it is kind of the same, working on building our data infrastructure and then also supporting retail.com and the Amazon business. So those pieces were similar in both of those roles. As we try, and I try, when I approach digital or growth, it's not about a lot of growth. Marketers think growth is just paid media. No, it's like the business has to grow. How does the business grow? The business grows through sales channels. It grows through different marketing channels. So we like to think of like channel by channel.

There's dot, there's retailer, there's Amazon. But the consumer doesn't think about it that way. They think I'm either going to go shop online or I'm going to go leave my house and buy something in the store. So I try to think of my world as like everything that someone would do online. Even though not all of those things are know, I don't own the P l for all of those things. I'm supporting all of those things. So consumer sees an ad, they decide to do a google search, they may go to Amazon, they may go to Sephora, they may go to our site. But I want to be able to help drive conversion across all digital channels in my world today.

Amazing. And just so our listeners have a little bit of context about Ilia and the brand, why don't you speak a little bit about the brand itself and the products that you guys serve as well as the scale that you guys are at today?

Yeah. So the brand itself got its start by being one of the first clean beauty brands that actually performed well. So clean beauty is kind of a new thing. And Ilya was a big innovator in this space and that's where so much of the explosive growth came from is same as Bobby like good product, market fit. It's an amazing product. There was a gap in the market and the brand filled it. And then they built a strong brand around it, and they knew who their customer was. And then everything else on top of that is just like the cherry on top.

So I think the products are actually exceptional. And then I think when it comes to who are these products for? It's interesting. We've done a study and we found there's a pretty good spread when it comes to demographics. But there was like an influencer video I saw today that was like, this product is like the grown up version of this other brand. And that's probably the best way to say it. The nice grown up version of some of the other products that are out.

Scale, just for scale. Shereen, how many products do you guys like beauty? Like you're saying clean beauty is a big space, but what types of products are you selling within the beauty space? And how many different Skus are you guys managing? All that kind of stuff?

Yeah, I would say we don't have the biggest collection out of all the beauty brands that are out there. We have a pretty good amount. I don't know the number off the top of my head, but it spans between beauty cosmetics and skincare. And the products are really like a hybrid, so it's like skincare powered makeup. And then we also have skincare.

Perfect. How is the beauty market just continues to be so explosive with so many brands? Every week I see an acquisition of nine figures for a different beauty brand that I've never even heard of. And so I am not a user of these products myself, so I don't have the pulse of the market. How is it so big? And then I assume it's like, the market is so big, but also that comes with challenges in terms of marketing, positioning, acquiring customers, et cetera. So what is it about the beauty space?

Yeah, fundamentally, if I were looking at a beauty brand as the way an investor would, it's like the margins are amazing, and then not always, but for a lot of brands, the brand is really what you're selling. The marketing is what you're selling. The vision of what someone could be is what you're selling. But I will say the differentiator that Ilya has is the products are actually exceptional, and then they built an amazing brand behind it. So when your margins are great, you have a lot of flexibility to invest in building a brand. And then I think there's a lot of consumption. Right. And then I think when you're thinking about positioning within the beauty space, there's different segments of the market that are more fickle and are trend based and maybe like younger audiences who are just kind of trying whatever is the new hot product.

And then there's segments of the market that they're a little bit more mature. And once they find something that works, they don't want to experiment. They're done with experimenting, they know what they like and they're just going to continue purchasing what they like. And then I think it's like expansion. Once you have product market fit or a strong assortment that people like, and you start to build a brand, a lot of the growth and expansion comes from retail. So if you're in Sephora, they're an amazing partner. But that's where brands get a lot of awareness. And then I think from there it's a game of constantly differentiating yourself against your competitors.

And I think there's a little bit of an echo chamber. That happens in beauty. I know, Ramon, we were talking about this before we started recording, but sometimes brands look at other brands and say, they're doing this, we should do this. And that's like this cycle that kind of happens in beauty where everyone's looking at each other and I think, like me coming in from a brand that just disrupted an industry, I'm like, let's stop looking at them. Let's start doing things that the other brands haven't been doing. Or what did we do when we were an innovator that really made us take off and makes other brands like, copy us? Let's do those things, because nobody else is.

Yeah, for sure. And I'm curious to what some of those are. And maybe if you can't speak to Ilya necessarily, then to like, what? Know tangible examples or ways in which people who know be listening and want to implement something that is completely different. How would you go about that?

Yeah, it kind of goes back to like, there's a lot of talk right now about building brand building or building a brand. What happens if all of your advertising just shuts off? How many organic customers or how much organic revenue would you have coming in if you weren't relying on paid acquisition? And I think that's kind of like the foundation and not saying that that's the right strategy for brands that are just starting out. But it's like once you're in the eight, nine figures as a brand, you kind of have to brand, you have to have a brand to get to that. Maybe low eight figures, but once you're in the eight figure mark, you have to build a differentiated brand. To really cement in consumers minds, like, why you're different. And so that as you're scaling, there's a point of diminishing returns in your ad spend. You can't just rely on paying for every conversion forever. You have to rely on something else to drive your sales.

And so I think both for Ilya and for Bobby, and specifically, like, if you look at Bobby as a case study, they came into an old industry, and that was largely probably run by men who never had to actually feed a baby or go through the pain of not being able to Breastfeed. And the company was founded by a lot of moms who went through that experience, so they were able to tell that story. When you bring storytelling into your brand building and your marketing, you're able to kind of unlock something different with audiences where you connect with them on a human level. And I think of when I was an Ilya consumer, before I started working here, one of the campaigns that they were running, that I had the most brand recall is they had, like, a mother and a daughter doing their makeup together. And I just remember seeing that, sharing it as examples with the marketing teams that I was on, it was so memorable that other brands started copying it. So it's like, what is that thing that you can do that no one else can replicate, and how do you do more of it?

I think that's such a good point, Shireen, in terms of just that framework of thinking, in terms of what is the brand, what is the storytelling and how do you differentiate yourself? My next question was going to be kind of following up on what you were talking about is you were in a unique position because you kind of knew the brand from the outside. As a consumer, you were able to come in, you already had a perspective on what's resonating with you as a. So, like, what were some of your first orders of business when they handed over the reins to, like, how did you think about getting into Ilya, and what were your first kind of action items that you wanted to take care of once you started in the.

That's. There's such a good story around this because I kind of started a couple of weeks before my actual start date, part time. So I was able to look at some of the numbers before I started, and they were right in the middle of budgeting for this year, 2024 and right before Q Four started. So it's like, about to be the craziest time we're planning next year. We have to have an amazing Q four. And the first thing I do anywhere is I'm like, I want to look at the financials. I want to understand the numbers, where we're going, how much we've been spending, what do we think we're going to hit next year? How much are we spending to get there? And on my first official day, I just became best friends with finance and I was like, let me see all these numbers. I'm like, we need to spend x million more in building our brand top of funnel.

That's what I strongly believe because we've been doing so much direct response and so many brands fall into this and right now brands are like, wow, iOS happened. COVID happened. We can't get back to the glory days of pre iOS and COVID and we're kind of stuck here. And it's really not about iOS or COVID. It's about you reach a certain level of growth and you have to change the way that you're thinking about growing the business in order to hit that next level of growth. And so I was like, we've been spending all of our media direct response. We need to go back to building the brand. So literally my first day, I built the case in the first couple of weeks, I'm like, we need to spend this much more and not have a direct response roas tied to it.

And we need to think about media buying in the business as more holistic. Like, media buying is not just to grow the direct to consumer business. It grows the retail.com, it grows Amazon, it grows retail in store. It's advertising. It's the same way back in the day, know Ford would buy a TV commercial. We're spending money to grow the business and we need to figure out how to do that so that we could grow the whole business. So now we're doing this full funnel approach to media buying with the assumption that it's going to grow the whole business holistically. So I think that's one of the first things I looked at.

And then the other thing, I just always create a financial forecast of my own and the D to C specific KPIs and how we need to hit them to get to the targets. And I noticed some gaps in our ad performance and I was like, okay, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to start this iterative ads lab. We have a ton of content. Every business has a ton of content. They don't always have the process in which to make it into really high performing ads. So let's create the process around this and put a dedicated cross functional effort and time and rigor into it. And we had this weekly process go, and we were able to, within a few weeks, immediately improve our direct response, add performance, and lower our customer acquisition cost. So I was rambling for a long time, but I'm like, it's really like looking at the financials, understanding the KPIs that are going to drive the business, and then building the, sharing that information with the teams and building the rigor and the process around achieving those KPIs to actually make sure it happens.

Yeah.

One thing that stood out while you were saying that is I'm thinking to myself, well, how do you prove that that plan worked over time? And so you mentioned, you essentially look at everything blended at the entire business holistically. But when the business is at that scale, there's also a macroeconomic factor. So that could happen. And so I wonder, how do you bake those in? How do you analyze that over the long term to prove your case?

That's the biggest question, right? It's like you start with a hypothesis. You start with what you think could be the solution, and then you have to make the case to get everyone to believe in that hypothesis and be willing to test. You know, Ilya is owned by Clarence, which is a french brand, like an amazing legacy brand, and they're incredibly supportive, and they want Ilya to build a brand over the long haul. So it's like we're building a legacy. So we have the support of the team in here, and then we have the support of the board. So that's step one is like, we've all kind of agreed to testing this hypothesis. And then step two is the hardest part is actually proving that the hypothesis works. And so that's when I think if you're thinking of full funnel media or global media, you're like, how do you put measurement in place for that? There's a million ways to measure.

And sometimes having too much information is actually the worst thing you can have, because you're like, everything is pointing to a different direction. So that's what we're doing now, is we're like, okay, we have the buy in, we're starting to make the changes, and we can kind of directionally see based on how sales are performing. But now we need a real way to measure this. And there's like, a couple of avenues that we're looking at. We're looking at some of the partners in the space who do, like, holdout testing, geolist studies, incrementality testing, and they basically ingest your D to C data, your retail data, your Amazon data, and they're able to partner with you to run tests to see if it's working. Another way is to do like a market study. So we're talking to someone else who's going to do like every year or twice a year we're going to measure the success and the growth of the brand. And then there's also platforms that can kind of directionally get you close.

So we're vetting a few different angles on how we're going to put our measurement in place.

Yeah, that's super interesting. And I definitely want to hear about how you guys measure influencer and creator as sort of that brand bucket. But I know according to a lot of our listeners at DTCPod, they might not be at this scale. So do you think about brand awareness and spending overall in different channels, not as direct response to grow the business? Do you think that applies to all stages or do you think there's a certain stage where you should start looking at that? Like if I'm seven figures, should I do it lightly and then slowly increase it? Should it always be done or should you focus on direct initially until you hit X scale of profitability?

It's a really good question and I think the answer is the way of growing businesses has changed so much. Like go back to pre iOS. Like you could just spin up any business and spin up ads and anyone can become a millionaire. And I'm like, oh my gosh, why? I missed my window, guys. But it's different. It really is different. And I think stages. I know, right? Okay, I got to get a newsletter.

Yeah, we'll talk after this about that. Yeah, I think at every stage there's a right amount of investment in harder to measure marketing strategies. So if you're just starting out, yeah, turn on ads. But what are the other things that are harder to measure that will drive that organic acquisition? And nothing's really organic. You're paying for everything. You have to pay for everything. So it's like, okay, in the beginning it might be gifting. You're doing a lot of product gifting for influencers.

You're using that content to turn it into ads. You're building your SEO on your site. You're starting to maybe work, depending on how much manpower, how much budget you have, start doing link building or start doing light PR, affiliate or some of these things that are outside just paid media, which I think a lot of smaller brands think that they can build their brand off of. And then let's say you're at the seven figure mark, it's just now a matter of if you've started with putting some of those things in place, how can you do more, how can you get more scale out of your non paid, non advertising channels so that again, pretend advertising goes out, you should still have sales coming in. And I don't think email and SMS are like real channels that you should rely on for those are great channels, but you need some avenue to send people into those channels. So it's like, I think for those seven figure brands, focus on SEO, focus on as much low cost influencer and press as you can get before you go into top of funnel branded media, TV and all of this other stuff that's harder to measure.

Yeah, low cost is a key word there, because, for example, I'm very curious on your take on podcast advertising for consumer brands because I see companies like on it, et cetera, sponsoring podcasts.

I'm like, man, that's going to be.

Hard to really make that return. But is it worth it from a brand perspective? I mean, it must be a brand play. How do you think about big podcast sponsorships for consumer brands?

It's interesting. I personally haven't done too much in podcast advertising. We did a little bit here and there at Bobby and it was hard to tell. Just like with influencer, how many of these people actually listened to the podcast and how many of these people found a coupon code like that, was scraped and used it. It's harder to measure, but I have heard from others in the direct to consumer space that they've been unlocking efficient CACs from podcast ads. So I don't know if it's know. The Paris Hilton podcast is probably not going to get you as good of returns as finding a demographically aligned podcast and having the host read the ad for you and give like a real testimonial. And it might be like a smaller scale, but heard people are having good success.

It's definitely something I want to try.

Well, Blaine just got us a sponsorship for Cast Magic on the Paris Hilton podcast, so maybe that won't bring the return we hope.

Are you kidding me?

No, I'm kidding. I definitely want to talk about influencer stuff and creators, how it blends into UGC influencer with Ilya because beauty has been blowing up on socials TikTok. And we had a guest on the podcast, Jimmy. He runs UGC with a ton of brands and ironically, he doesn't work with beauty brands. And I asked why I would think that that is the hottest sector and he's like, that's why it's really hard. It's too competitive. Maybe that is for starter brands. But how are you guys looking at the overall social strategy?

It's a good question. It's something we have hours and hours of discussions about internally because it's such a big part of beauty. And I think we have an amazing influencer team and an amazing social team who has the whole spectrum of influencer unlock. And there's the partners that you pay that have more like brand awareness and share a voice in platform. So one thing we measure is share of voice in platform. Another thing we measure is we have performance partners, so partners that we expect an ROI from, and then we have ad creators, and within that you can go even deeper. But I think it's really giving goals to different things. And one of the things that we've noticed is the days of having an influencer do like a swipe up to shop and you make a huge return on your influencer spend are kind of, I don't know if that's how people shop anymore.

It's not as direct anymore. Someone may see an influencer, they may then be hit by an ad. And it kind of goes into that whole attribution discussion. So we kind of try to bucket influencer as more of like a brand awareness. And we measure the earned media value and the impression share and the share of voice and then know try to strategically have goals for different influencers outside of that. Like, we just partnered with Addison Rae for the launch of our new product and she reaches a totally different demographic than what our other traditional marketing to date has been reaching. So it's like this is us doing a test to see can we unlock our brand to a whole new audience and make a trend around it and kind of do this native to the platform to TikTok like trend and have all these other influencers that aren't as big as this mega influencer stitch the content and try and make it something, and then it becomes a press halo. And we're trying to get as much as we can out of some of these partnerships.

And then I think the other part of it is like, okay, so now we also need people to create UGC ads for us that fall under different guidelines. They may not need to be known as well. We need unexpiring rights for this stuff. We want to do whatever we want with it across different platforms. So I think it's like, okay, a business should look at all the areas that they're sourcing content. We even look at press quotes, press articles as content. So all the different ways we're sourcing content, our brand owned content that we make influencer content, press content. And now how do you create the way of working? Kind of like what I talked about, where now you have all this content, you've sourced it, how do you actually cut it into ads and make as much use out of it as you possibly can or pitch it to press or make your content work for you beyond just, we worked with this influencer.

Yeah, I think the part of mentioning it to press or something is huge because, and I'm curious, and I want to know more about the stack of the team around this, because you have to double down when there's momentum and you have to catch things that might happen on social and use that and leverage that into press, or you could totally miss a wave. You didn't even know the product was catching. So how do you guys report on all this? Who knows where things need to go? To which teams, what does the overall creator team look like?

That's the hardest part of the work, is figuring out how to do all the work together. Right. So we have the digital and ecom.org, which is mine, and then we have our marketing team and our creative team, and they all roll up to our CMO. And so previously, before our CMO joined, those three teams were kind of like siloed. And the reality is all three of those teams need each other to make the business work. And then within our marketing team, we have social and influencer, and they work really closely together to kind of bring that native social trend creator content to the rest of the. And then our creative team is kind of more like studio photography design. So we really have two kind of content sources.

And then how do they all work together? This is also, like another thing we're figuring out as the business grows, everyone kind of has their own little channels and their own little silos, and they're all kind of just like working on their thing. And it might be easier to collaborate when you're a smaller team, but as you get bigger, you actually need to put structure in place for people to work together. So it's like, one of the things that we introduced is a dam, a digital asset manager. And one of the things we're working on is how do we bring all that social first content? We have all the studio content. How do we bring our social content in there? Because we can basically manage, like this influencer paid rights expire in a month, and this other one, it's three months and this other one is unlimited. Even just managing all the rights is like a whole piece of work. But I think it's really like the old fashioned way of just getting people onto the same call and having them figure out a process that works, that's repeatable, that takes the thinking out of the working. Shereen?

I think it's so interesting because like you're saying at the scale that you guys are at, you guys are overseeing so many different strategies, there's so many teams that need to be able to collaborate, cross functionally to pull all of this off. I'm very curious. Just based off know now you've been in the space for a while, you've had the experience across the other brands. You're seeing what's happening at Ilya. What are some of your favorite, I guess maybe like channels or trends that you start to see popping up, where you guys are starting to see some cool opportunities, like is it stuff that's more know, let's say, on the site side of things in terms of optimizing conversion, is it stuff that you're doing in terms of targeting Amazon keywords? Is it a fully off site strategy? What are just some of your favorites that you're seeing in the moment?

Yeah, I saw a quote yesterday from the creative director or the head of creative for liquid death, and he said, basically, I don't remember what it was, but he was like, we're not trying to compete with other water companies. We're trying to compete with everything in your social feed. So I think it's having the obsession of capturing people's attention is probably the most important thing. But if I were to go into one of the things, I don't know if this is my favorite, but it's one of the things that is most top of mind for me is like new online sales channels that are competing with Amazon. And I think if you're running a direct to consumer brand, you know that you're on probably Instagram shop, and maybe you've heard about TikTok Shop and maybe you're on it and maybe you've heard about flip, this new social selling app where you get money for engaging with really it's like ad content. And so we're trying to experiment with all of these. And I think especially in beauty, it's like everyone wants to be first wherever the customer is. And so again, I don't know if this is my favorite, but I think this is a trend.

As Ecom continues to develop, more and more of these competitors that are trying to take share from Amazon and Instagram are going to start popping up and none of them want to share customer data with the retailer. So we all have to be comfortable with, like, we're not going to be able to keep our customers data and we need to be able to show up where our customer is. And so we started this test in December with flip. We've seen amazing volume, but we're still like, I don't know, is this incremental? Why are we doing this? Is our KPIs holding? There's a lot of questions. I don't know if it's favorite, but it's definitely something to watch for and test.

So, Shereen, I know top of funnel is sort of the focus as you came into the business, but I also know you're an expert in all areas of growth. And growth isn't just up a funnel. Then you have the optimizations in the conversions, the optimization in the funnels. And beauty is one of the categories that has innovated the most when it comes to funnels, with quizzes and all types of stuff. So how do you think about conversions and playing with the numbers that actually make a big impact at the top? So do you do that simultaneously or is top of funnel the focus? We will worry about that once we've got top of funnel down.

No. You know, I'm a crazy person and I have to do it all at the same time.

I figured that would be the answer.

Yeah, I think especially for beauty, even though it is a consumable, you're still trying to win. It's all about new customer acquisition and as profitable as you can. So it's like the obsession with unlocking profitable scale in your ad account and then unlocking conversion rate optimizations on your site. And that's something like, I'm so impressed by how much growth Ilya has had to date without doing any conversion rate optimization on site. So that's like one of my first things. I'm like, we have some site architectural stuff that we're working on, but conversion, like getting conversion rate optimization set up so that we can start testing is next. And then the thing I really learned at Bobby is the number one lever for growth. If you're already getting traffic to your site, the number one lever for growth is your offer.

And we see this like every BFCM when you have a discount. And I don't mean just like doing a discount, but we're focusing really heavily on optimizing our offer for different audiences and testing our offers. And so it's like beauty generally does limited, exclusive sets during holidays and bundles. And so we're like, how can we really come up with the best new customer acquisition offer? And then how do we know that once customers try our products, they like it? We have a subscription, we know how our subscription performs. We know the LTV growth that we get from our loyalty program. So now it's like optimizing all of those programs and how do you make them better and cooler than whatever they can get elsewhere? It's constant competition for attention everywhere.

One interesting thing about the conversion rate is that you mentioned that they got to that scale without focusing so much on it. And yet smaller businesses might get caught up in conversion rate, and there's a diminishing return on focusing so much in conversion rate. That's not the reason why you're not a $10 million company or 20 or 100 million dollar company. It's not because you're not doing conversion rate well enough. So what advice would you give to smaller brands in terms of how to approach conversion rate? Should they do it in sprints? Is it something you're always working on, or should you just not worry about it until you're at a certain stage?

That's such a good question. And I love the OKR framework and I love kind of like bringing in traditional agile product management philosophies. So the way that I would do it is no matter what scale you are, you need a North Star metric. You need the one thing that you're trying to do this year or this quarter, and then you need the objectives that roll up to that North Star metric. And one of them might be conversion rate, another one might be paid acquisition related, spanning the full funnel. And then how are you going to measure those objectives? Like, if we are going to increase conversion rate, you can increase conversion rate by just reducing prices by 50%. What are we actually going to do to measure the conversion rate increase and impact? And then when you kind of have that list of things that you need to do, that roll up to the North Star metric, it's creating a list of ideas that attach to each of those and then prioritizing that based on impact. Your confidence, like the impact it's going to have, the confidence that you have that it's going to reach that impact and the ease.

So it's just like a prioritization framework that helps you determine what things can we do that are easy to do that will get us to one of these goals as quickly as possible. And I feel like that way you can attack conversion rate. You can attack paid and SEO and all these other things, but you're actually rank scoring it by the thing that's going to have the most immediate impact and be the easiest to do. If you're always doing that and you're always reprioritizing, then I think you don't have time for those. This minor change that's going to have like a 0.1% impact. You're only doing the highest impact stuff.

Yeah, I think, Shereen, I think thinking in those frameworks is so important because a lot of times you can get wrapped up in the wrong stuff. But I do have a question about something that's maybe a little bit more specific, kind of along those lines. Do you guys do anything? I know a lot of the talk in ECOM is like, you want to optimize your landing pages to the ads that you're running. Is that something that you guys do at Bobby? Are you guys optimizing different landing pages to the offers that you're running to the ad creative, or are you just taking a broader strategy and having generic pages that convert decently?

We didn't get to that when I was at Bobby. It was like one of those things that was on my list. But like said, like, there were such other bigger impact pages that we did first. And it's also on our list here at Ilya. And I think there were certain contexts in which we might try it and it might be more impactful. And then there are certain contexts where it's like the effort to create this conversion focused landing page, is it really worth building, or should we just change the destination of where we're sending our traffic to see if we can see a lift that way? So it goes back to the prioritization. But one thing that we've been observing, and I think maybe there are certain use cases that make more sense for brands than others. And, I mean, it also goes back to the question of, are we going to create this paid media landing page? Do we have the bandwidth, or should we just update our whole PDP design? Which one's going to be more beneficial? I think paid landing pages are super impactful.

But one thing I would wonder is, okay, how much money are you spending per channel? Is there one channel in particular that's converting less good than others? And I mean, one that comes to mind for us and maybe some other brands is TikTok. Like, users don't want to leave the app. They are kind of like, from what I found, like lower quality traffic than you would find on meta so in an instance like that, it's like, okay, do we create a bunch of meta landing pages and test them against each other, or do we create a TikTok landing page that looks super native to TikTok and makes the user that's coming from TikTok, who hates to click out of the app, feel more like they're still in the app? And what kind of impact could that have? And could that actually make this whole channel more profitable? Those are the kind of questions that we're asking. But I think if I were to wait, like landing page testing versus offer testing, I would say offer testing has a bigger impact.

Love that. No, that's right on the money. And as we wrap up here, Shereen, I know you've already covered a lot. I know you had to sink your teeth into a whole bunch in terms of getting up to speed in the role, but what's on your plate for the rest of this year? What are some of the big initiatives that you want to knock out in the coming quarters?

Biggest thing I want to knock out is optimizing our site. Like I said, this is one thing that we haven't put a great deal of focus on optimizing our offers. And then I think, like always, I think brands are just, most brands neglect SEO so much and don't understand the potential impact that it could have. And I think last time I was on the pod, we talked about this 360 approach to SEO and using education to build your SEO through affiliate Partners press listicles, your own on site, like video optimization. So I think just getting SEO unlocked is going to be really fun.

This would be a whole nother topic we can have at another time. But it's also really interesting for companies that are already really established to build their own media and distribution and their own content. As we kind of sort of start seeing diminishing returns with influencers, there's more fragmentation. I think that's something that could really work, starting with SEO and seeing what that develops into. But, Shereen, for anyone who's listening, how else can they keep up with you? Where can they follow you? Or just learn more about Ilya beauty and get some coupon codes?

Yes, follow me on. You know, I don't tweet the thread boy tweets, but I tweet some funny stuff. You can find me on LinkedIn, of course. And then if you give me your email and your phone number on my site, I'll give you a disc count code. Awesome.

I love that. All right, thanks so much, Shireen.

Thank you. Guys.