DTC POD Megan O'Brien, Arch Insights: Market Validation, Positioning & New Products
Blaine Bolus 00:00:06 - 00:00:27
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What's up, DTC Pod. Today we're joined by Megan O'Brien, who's the founder and CEO of Arch Insight. So Megan, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Arch, how you got started and a little bit about your background as well.
megan o'brien 00:01:01 - 00:02:41
Yeah, absolutely excited to be here. My name is Megan, I started Arch about a year ago and the goal with Arch is to provide startups and SMBs access to consumer insights and market research. Have worked with 22 different brands in the DTC space, both in products and services at this point, helping them with things like concept testing, brand tracking and just general consumer insights to answer some of their biggest questions before they start to invest in some of those kind of changes in their products and services. I started Arch, like I mentioned, about a year ago, which was kind of just a culmination of many of the steps I've taken in my career up to this point. I started out as a consultant, so kind of with the analytical background and looking at a variety of different markets and then went to Harry's Inc. And was on the team that launched Flamingo. And this is where I got kind of a deep view into consumer insights and really the value of consumer insights. Harry's as a brand really values consumer insights and has an awesome consumer insights team. So I learned a ton there on the Flamingo team and use consumer insights to make a lot of the decisions that we were making at launch and kind of in that early growth stage. Then went to HBS, spent some time in BC and did some freelance work while I was in school and Consumer Insights and just continued to see that there was just a gap in the market for consumer insights providers that startups could afford and were helpful for startups. So post graduation did jumped into Arch full time.
Blaine Bolus 00:02:42 - 00:03:20
No, it sounds like a good match between having the background in consulting and DTC and CPG and then being able to launch a service like this yourself. So the one thing I'm curious about is why don't you tell us a little bit about Consumer Insights, right? Why does it matter? How should brands be thinking about it? Especially when you're taking a product to market, maybe before you fully invested an idea, found a manufacturer, anything like that, you're starting with a problem and you say, I want to come up with a product to solve this problem. So what's the role that Consumer Insights play in that whole process and how do people get them and how do people use them?