Away’s CEO & New DTC Playbook: Amazon, TikTok Shop, and 300% Over Plan

Matt Bertulli (0:00)

This is the first time I've got a bag lady and a bag man, so we don't actually normally get people that are close in category, because most of us sell weird things. Jess Schinazi from Away.

Jessica Schinazi (0:11)

Hi.

Matt Bertulli (0:11)

This is great. Away is one of the OG, Gen 1, DTC brands.

And you're fresh in the CEO job, and you took it to Amazon.

Jessica Schinazi (0:25)

Yes.

Matt Bertulli (0:26)

Please explain.

Jessica Schinazi (0:27)

And that has been so exciting.

Matt Bertulli (0:29)

Okay. Why? Was this a battle? Was this a fight internally?

Jessica Schinazi (0:33)

It was not a battle because I came to do that very specifically. We're celebrating 10 years this year, 10 years in, an OG brand of DTC. Absolutely one of the earliest darlings of what it means to be direct to consumer. I came in 24, we opened Amazon in 25

Amazon has been amazing to us, and we opened Amazon and a lot of others, Nordstrom, Dix, Shields, Bloomingdale, etc.

Matt Bertulli (0:57)

All at once or did you layer them in?

Jessica Schinazi (0:59)

All in 18 months.

We're still going. But when I joined, Amazon told us we had hundreds of thousands of people looking for the away search terms on amazon.com.

Matt Bertulli (1:13)

That's not surprising at all.

Jessica Schinazi (1:14)

Hundreds of thousands of actual demand on the platform that competitors were bidding against. They were going into private label, Amazon Basics, and then when they were not coming to the website. So when we joined on Amazon, immediately we captured that degree zero demand that was there so fast.

Today we own eight to nine percent of the Amazon market share in our category in less than 12 months and it's still growing month on month. So it's incredibly exciting to be there. And I don't think of it as not a DTC anymore. I think of it as an extension of the website. The business model that we're into on Amazon, which is an FBA 3P model.

How much we are able to start retargeting those customers to also bring them back into the website. Truly for us, Amazon is becoming this great acquisition moments. And then it's coming back to the site.

Matt Bertulli (2:14)

Okay. This is what you wanted to go into.

Curtis Matsko (2:17)

So, yeah, 10 years. I'm a 10 years too.

They bought it for 90% of the time. And the people have always been out there on the largest marketplace in the world, buying this stuff. Why didn't they do it? And what fight did you have to get them to do this?

Jessica Schinazi (2:31)

So, I think that you actually have to wait a little bit before you go to Amazon. Because you are building 10 years of community insights, behavior understanding, preferences that you get. When we went there, we were super thoughtful and intentional about what kind of products we're going to put. Not the full assortment, limited bestsellers at first, kind of like testing it out in that way. And so the entire argument, the battle that you're talking about, frankly, no battle because when you're looking at the channel economics of it, everything that you're not spending in your acquisition costs to your website, you're now shifting into trade terms or referral fees to an Amazon.

And beyond that, it has compounding effects actually below the line as well, that you don't have to subsidize on your own website. So flipping the narrative into, it's not again like one or the other, it's one that's going to compound the other, and the entire game, the winning this is building the bridges between the two platforms. That's how I'm thinking about it.

Curtis Matsko (3:38)

That's the way you look at it. It's not how everybody looks at it. And we have all these D2C experts, and they're always fighting around about this. I'm like, if I get them to Shopify, I know I pay more, but I know their name, I know their address, I know their email.

Jessica Schinazi (3:51)

I own my customer thing.

Curtis Matsko (3:52)

I have their cell phone number. I can send them, I can go over and deliver flowers to these people, right? On Amazon, they're trying to control all of those people. So I'll tell you what we thought. We thought, how many of those people can we use AI and knowledge to find out who they really are and move them over to our side? So you had to tell people, this is what we're going to do. We're going to make them our true customers. That's just one channel, right?

Jessica Schinazi (4:19)