YouSaid · the spoken record

Max Rhodes

lines on the record: 29
first: 2022-12-08
most recent: 2022-12-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It is the one thing that they have going for them. They don't have a ton of debt, which I think is the way that larger retailers tend to get in trouble is when interest payments all of a sudden balloon and they can't cover those interest payments. Our retailers benefit from the fact that they tend to be pretty asset light and not carry a ton of debt. And so they're able to withstand different economic conditions more successfully. But yeah, it's hard out there. Running a small business is really, really challenging. That's one of the reasons why I love our mission so much is we have the ability to really meaningfully impact the lives of our customers on both sides, both the brands and the retailers.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lowering their costs by getting volume based discounts for brands, by reducing their freight costs, that ultimately can raise their bottom line. And if we could take their net margin from 3% to 6%, we'd double their take-home pay, which is just an incredible impact on the life of a small business owner. That could be the difference between them being able to send their kid to college and not being able to send their kid to college.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number one, they want their sales to go up. So continuing to focus on better understanding what products sell for which retailers and helping them make better buying decisions, you know, that could look like an inventory management system that could look like integrating with point of sale systems of retailers to inform the algorithms that we use to help them buy. The second big focus for them is saving them time. One example is it takes a ton of time to input products into their point of sale system. It seems like a small thing, but they spend hours on it every week and it's really tedious. And so we've built an integration where we automatically push products into the point of sale systems of our retailers. And that's something that we're continuing to improve upon. And then the third thing is they need to save money. You know, ultimately, you can sell as much as you want, but if your margins aren't great, then you're not going to do all that well. The average retailer has like a net profit margin of three or four percent. And so if we can help them save money by”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number one, taking what's working in North America among gift retailers and apparel retailers. That's really been our core market to date. In applying that playbook internationally, in Europe, in the food and beverage space, I think pets and toys and hardware, there's a bunch of kind of adjacent verticals. The other big focus for us is starting to think more about how we can help our retailers succeed. There's a whole world of opportunity out there for us to really expand beyond just being a marketplace where they source products to really being the way that they run their business. We're really scanning the horizon for more opportunities to help our retailers succeed because again, we're all in this together. We're partners with our brands and our retailers. If we can help our retailer succeed, that's good for our brands. It's good for us. It's good for everybody. We're really thinking about building an operating system, a wholesale operating system around the marketplace.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the priorities, about people, whether it's the decision to make an acquisition or something, it can run the gamut in terms of what types of opportunities you're assessing and what you're saying yes and no to. But I do strongly believe that the bigger you get, the more concentrated the decisions become. And in many ways, the job becomes like, how do I identify those opportunities, what those decisions are, and then how do I make sure that I make those decisions well?”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, I think that's a big part of kind of the next phase. I really do think of it as like a machine that is kind of self-sustaining and learning in order to be able to make the decisions itself. Where, you know, anytime I'm making a decision, it's really a result of not designing the organization the right way to be able to work things out on its own. With the exception of four or five really, really big decisions every year, which I think are very important to get right.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the last two years have been particularly insane, but it all comes back to building an organization that's really resilient in the face of change because change is kind of a natural factor of life when you're running a business. I talk about the way that our retailers benefit from fragmentation and their ability to be nimble. I actually have a similar organizational philosophy where we try to build a bunch of autonomous teams. And, you know, my job as a leader is to make sure that they're focused in the right areas. Their job is to figure out how to respond to the facts on the ground and to make the right decisions and take advantage of the opportunities that we see.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“becomes more about building a team that is then delivering that product to as many people as possible. And then the next phase, which I think is the phase that we're starting to enter, is it starts to become more about capital allocation. And, you know, your job is really about how do I build a machine that is taking capital and generating a return. And that's ultimately what business is all about. This next phase for us is really about making those really good capital allocation decisions and then building a culture and a company and an organization that can go out and execute and take advantage of the strategic decisions that we make about where we want to focus our resources.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My wife and I have this sort of running joke that every six months I turn to her and I say, I don't know what I'm doing. Like I really, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm bad at my job. And every time she says, you know, you said that six months ago. And every time I say, but this time it's different. I like really don't know what I'm doing this time. And literally every time I feel that way. But that's one of the things that's really fun about it is the fact that it's constantly changing and shifting and every new stage of scale, every new change in the macroeconomic environment dramatically changes the nature of the job. When you're first starting out, you're really just a product manager. Your job is just to build a great product that people love and you're working directly with your designers and your engineers to build that product. And then you start to see some success and you raise a little bit of money. You're able to build a team. The job starts to be more like a GM where, you know, you now have to worry about sales and marketing and building distribution and your job.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Traditionally, local retailers offer you as a consumer is products that you're not going to find somewhere else, products that you aren't going to find just searching on Amazon, Stash in Norman, Oklahoma was most excited about this holiday season, sourcing European goods and kind of introducing products from Belgium and Italy and the Nordics to customers in North America. And the idea that I was in Norman, Oklahoma, able to find the coolest chocolates from Belgium or the coolest chairs from the Nordics because FAIR had facilitated that was something that I think was really exciting to me and cool to see.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Year, we're in a pretty unique position to be able to create a truly global business that knocks down a lot of those barriers that it traditionally have stood in the way of even stronger thriving cross-border commerce.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number one is it's just such a huge market opportunity. Europe is actually even more fragmented than the US from a retail perspective. There's even more independent retail than there is in the US. And the same problems exist, same issues with trade shows with sourcing, with sales reps. There was a lot of demand among our North American retailers for European brands and a lot of demand among European retailers for our North American brands. There was a ton of cross-border commerce already happening, despite the fact that that cross-border commerce is extremely complex logistically and it's expensive. We saw a big opportunity for us to leverage our North American supply base and our North American retailer base to get a foothold over there. Like I said, we've grown faster in Europe than we ever did in North America, despite the fact that it didn't completely live up to expectations this past year.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really one of the hardest things that I've ever had to do. We made some mistakes over the course of the last year. We built a talent team that was designed to continue doubling headcount year over year, just like we have the previous couple of years. And that world no longer exists where it makes sense for startups to continue doubling headcount in a world where capital is so much more expensive. And we made a bet in Europe where we hired a team really, really aggressively there. And we have seen some really good success in Europe, but it's not growing as fast as we hoped that it would when we built the team out there. And so we did make the difficult decision to restructure those two teams and to pull back a little bit. But I think those decisions ultimately are going to help us move forward and be stronger and really focus on our customers and their success over the coming years.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the beginning of the pandemic, I think something like 20 to 30 percent of our retailers had websites. And today, 90% of them have websites. In some ways, they're now coming out of the pandemic in a stronger position than they were at the beginning because brick and mortar retailers fully recovered, even with the uncertain macroeconomic environment, their sales are still above where they were in 2019. So foot traffic is fully recovered, and they now have websites and they figured out how to sell online. They figured out how to use social media. It was kind of the kick in the pants that I think a lot of them needed to adopt a lot of those online tools and to figure out how to be omnichannel. Right now, about 30% of all of our sales ultimately are sold via online channels. It's almost identical to the overall e-commerce penetration. And I expect to see that continue to grow. But I don't expect it ever to be 100% online. We're continuing to see there's a robust need for brick and mortar to reach.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure, the retailer's success is the key determinant of the success both for the brands and for FAIR. We saw that at the beginning of the pandemic where all of our retailers shut down. We saw our sales fall by like 80%, which meant our brands saw their sales fall by 80%. for the next three months, we gave them an extra 30 days of payment terms so that they didn't actually have to pay because they had no revenue coming in. We built a runway calculator for them, including don't buy inventory. Like that was one of our number one pieces of advice was like stop buying inventory. We gave them advice for how to shift their sales online. We saw in that moment at the end of the day, it all comes down to making sure that these retailers succeed and the brands understand that we understand that.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The answer is both. Our brands and our retailers are both incredibly important. Our retailers couldn't succeed if our brands aren't creating great products. Our brands couldn't succeed if our retailers aren't selling. There really is a true alignment of interests, which I think is different than the way that consumer marketplaces work. Like I think one of the challenges when you're an Amazon or a DoorDash or an Uber is at the end of the day the consumer is the one that matters and you're always kind of trying to squeeze as much as you can out of the supplier in order to benefit the consumer in our marketplace. It's a little different where they're both small businesses. And I think both the retailers and the brands recognize that it's a partnership. There's a lot more empathy. There's more of a feeling of community on both sides. And our responsibility as the...”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, big retailers, because they're buying in such large quantities, the brands need to produce the goods in order to fill the orders of those big retailers. And so I'm a big retailer. I'm placing my order like nine months in advance. The brands are then producing those goods and then shipping them to me. With smaller retailers, the goods have already been produced and they're just buying whatever the brands have. And that, again, allows them to be much more nimble and respond much more quickly to changes and trends, to changes in the macroeconomic environment. And it's one of those things where actually being smaller is better.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think this is an example of where independent retailers are actually better positioned than the larger players. They can just be so much nimbler. They're buying much closer to need and they're buying smaller quantities and their ability to respond much more quickly because they just don't have to plan as far in advance. It's a less complicated operation. And in many ways, their fragmentation is an advantage. Our ability to take the advantages of fragmentation, combine them with the advantages of scale is one of the reasons why we're so excited about the future for fair.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right That's right. We don't actually hold the inventory, but we do take on the inventory risk. That's something that big box retailers have been able to do for decades. It's something called buybacks, where if you're a brand and you sell into a big box store, if your products don't sell, they're going to ship them back and they're going to demand the money back. And that's not something that small retailers have been able to do. We're able to do that because we have all this data from this community of retailers where we know what's going to sell and where it's going to sell.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Payment terms and free returns and offer that to their retailers outside of FAIR. And over the course of those first three years, we just saw really explosive growth. Things did accelerate during the pandemic as well, where we had these twin tailwinds of our retailer sales were being buoyed by stimulus and the shift from services to goods. And then the trade shows were all shut down. And so we saw this crazy acceleration last year in the business.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We found product market fit really quickly. While I was at Square, I was also introducing this product called the Blunt Umbrella to the US market. And that experience exposed me to the world of trade shows and the way that the online wholesale market traditionally worked. So during the weekends, I was a small business owner myself going to these trade shows. During the week, I was a product manager working at Square. And I think that gave us a really unique insight into this massive market that was just so clearly so broken. Because traditionally they're afraid of buying inventory that's not going to sell that insight that offering free returns and net 60 payment terms could get them comfortable buying products online for the first time, that led to the marketplace really taking off from the very beginning. We figured out that actually brands were excited to be able to use net 60%.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea is to bring the benefits of scale of data to these small retailers by creating this community where they all can help each other. So we have 500,000 stores buying products from us. That enables every single one of those stores to learn from one another. Traditionally, these stores have operated in silos. Large retailers have always had the ability to try something out in one location. And then if it works, double down in all the other locations, we bring that ability to them. Small retailers haven't been able to get loans in the past because they're really difficult to underwrite because we have 500,000 stores. We are in a much better position to be able to underwrite them. So we give them net 60 payment terms. Small stores traditionally haven't been able to get the best prices from brands. We actually negotiate volume-based discounts on their behalf and we offer free freight to them. We're leveling the playing field so that they can also succeed with the structural advantages that large”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started fair with this idea that independent retail has actually proven to be pretty resilient over the last 20 years. And people talk a lot about the retail apocalypse. Independent retailers actually went through their version of the retail apocalypse back in the 1970s and 80s as Walmart and all these category killers like Best Buy and Bed Beth and Beyond popped up, Barnes& Noble and Borders, they made life really difficult for small retailers. They were able to offer convenience where you could get all of these products all in one place. And then they were able to use their scale to get much lower prices and to really push prices down with vendors. And that led to a wave of closures from the 70s through the 90s.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Place in the economy and their success over the coming years. I mean, the same way that I think local retailers across the country are.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was back home in Oklahoma and I visited a few stores, but one in particular is this retailer stash that is one of my favorite stores, partly I think because from my hometown, partly because they've been using Fair for a really long time. Stash is such a great example of the kind of retailer that FAIR serves and is an example of the broader shop local movement that I think FAIR is helping to accelerate. You know, it's in the small downtown in my hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, that when I was growing up was like pretty dead, honestly. It was like kind of a depressing place. It felt like it was just a ghost town from the 1950s. And there's been this revitalization movement over the course of the last 10 to 20 years. Stash was one of the first stores to open up there. And there's a bunch of restaurants and coffee shops. And it's now a really cool part of the Norman community. And I think they're all feeling really good about their...”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the past two years have been a pretty wild time to be in the retail industry. We went from wondering if our retailers were going to survive at the beginning of the pandemic to seeing them thriving last year, our retailers' sales were way, way up over even the pre-pandemic baselines. And then I would say this year has been a little bit of a return to normal. And we don't really know what things are going to look like next year as the Fed continues to raise interest rates, as inflation continues to be a concern. Talking to a lot of our retailers, they're worried, but they're also optimistic over the course of the last couple of months. Sales start to stabilize a bit. And actually Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, both outperformed expectations. I would say cost. Optimistic is the way that we're all feeling.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As Walmart and all these category killers like Best Buy and Bed Bath Beyond popped up. You know, they've made life really difficult for small retailers. And then stores started to fight back where they really compete on experience, on curation, on community Independent retailers are actually better positioned than the larger players. They can just be so much nimbler. Our ability to take the advantages of fragmentation, combine them with the advantages of scale is one of the reasons why we're so excited about the Future Crew Fair. Leveling the playing field with the structural advantages that large at scale players have been using for the past 50 years.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale Summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Read Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Massad, and more will be there with us october twentieth through twenty second in San Francisco. If you're building something great or you want to build something great, we want you there with us too. Join us at masters of scale.com slash apply 26. That's masters of scale. com slash apply twenty six. We don't really know what things are going to look like next year as the Fed continues to raise interest rates, as inflation continues to be a concern. Our retailers, they're worried, but they're also optimistic Actually, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday both outperformed expectations.”
2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2022-12-08 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: How Main Street retailers are out-pivoting big-box giants, w/Faire’s Max Rhodes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT