Why Most New Appliance Categories Fail…and How FoodCycler Didn’t | EP. 216

Serge Liberman 00:03
80% of my work, building the brand awareness, building the understanding of why and how and how useful it is in your day to day life.

Narrator 00:13
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I'm your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies. Get to know the ins and outs of the eCommerce Industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.

Andrew Maff 00:28
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show as usual. I'm your host, Andrew MAFF, and today I am joined by the amazing Serge Liberman, who is the E commerce director over at Food Cycle Science Corporation, who does the food cycler. Serge, how you doing, buddy? Ready for good show?

Serge Liberman 00:43
Hey, yeah, thank you for inviting me here. Doing really well. It's crazy snowing outside, but yeah, I feel really cozy and happy to be here on the show tonight.

Andrew Maff 00:56
Beautiful. Yeah, you're out of Canada, right?

Serge Liberman 00:59
Yeah, Toronto. And it's, yeah, it's probably half a meter or snow already just this morning.

Andrew Maff 01:05
Got to love the winter. Yeah. As of the recording of this, it is kind of, I guess we could say mid December for the most part. But by the time this goes out, it'll probably be worse. So buckle up. Always fun, crazy winters. I always like starting these off pretty stereotypically. I kind of just like to give you the floor and just tell us a little bit about your background, how you got started over at Food Cycle, and we'll take it from there.

Serge Liberman 01:30
Sounds good? Well, my my background, in a nutshell, I was trying to figure out, you know, what I want to be when I will be growing up when I was like 17 years old, and I heard about this new, almost super, super superstitious thing that sounds completely unnatural back in the days digital marketing and whatnot, And then E commerce, and it just got me interested. And then I tried it couple times in at Publicis. It was Leo Burnett, back in the days as a project manager, working on clients mostly. And then, yeah, I think, what can I say? I just got involved. I got lured in, and since then, digital marketing and E commerce is my world. And, yeah, it's been four years at Publicis, then I thought that I know everything, and we founded our own agency, and it worked really well. We actually sold it after another three years, because back in the days I had, we had our first kid, and I should, you know, I should have been more present at home and not working 24/7, necessarily. So I started to work at Mila, which is a German, German engineering appliances and the company that manufactures and sells them, another seven years of my career as a head of digital and customer experience. And you know, building loyalty, building the whole path, not not until the purchase, from awareness to purchase, but you know a way after that, continue the and building up the communication and relationships with customers, because it's a luxurious brand. You pay, let's say, from 20 to 50 $100 per oven. You would expect as a customer that you will be, you'll have a high level of service and communication. And you know, something afterwards, some aftertaste. So I was working on this aftertaste for a while, building the CRM, building some other projects, IT, or across IT and digital. And then, yeah, it's been seven years. Time flies really fast. And I thought, okay, seven years in the same company, I'm still I still feel pretty young. And what's the next? What's the next journey and milestone. And yeah, this company, Food Cycle Science, reached out to me about a little bit than a year ago, and it's a fascinating Canadian based startup producing food. Food cycle is basically, it's a machine that you put every, every piece of your organic waste in. You click one button, you go to sleep in three hours. It's done. It's orderless, you know, no, no noise. It's quite then, quieter than your dishwasher. And yeah, it just the product got fascinated me. And also, kids got super involved. And they happy to play with it all around and try different stuff they can put in or they can't. And then the machine will be done. So yeah, it's it's been fun and but it's also a different scale, because at Mila, I was doing only working on Canadian market. Now at Food Cycle Science, as a director of E commerce, I work on on the sales globally. And it's not only our own web store anymore. It's Amazon, it's Walmart, it's Racketin in Japan, it's media market in Germany. You know, it's, it's different scale things, and it's getting even more interesting.

Dan Head 02:08
Fast Forward, you know, four months in you had covid hit, you know, in 2020, and that was very interesting, because we were launching all our gummy supplements, and we were very late to launch vitamin C gummies and vitamin d3 and B12 and all these other great gummies that were out there. So launching them in the middle of covid certainly helped. In hindsight, quite a bit. Oh, yeah. So that got us going. You know, I'm still, currently managing everything for them now, and we've grown the business into $600,000 a month business.

Andrew Maff 05:31
Tell me a little bit about the appliance first. So, like, obviously, you know, kind of like your standard, more like food composting type of thing, like, not as picked up in the States as in other countries. Am I right?

Serge Liberman 05:44
Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Maff 05:45
What do you so? And obviously, as E commerce director, your goal being like, how do we introduce this more into the states and kind of get over that barrier? One of the things I was curious about, because I saw your background at Mila and like, I was like, All right, that I happen to be dealing with replacing appliances right now, because I'm doing a renovation, and so you're, you were working somewhere where they're selling appliances that in the customer is essentially probably replacing an existing appliance that they have in most scenarios, right? This would be an added appliance. So it's like extra space, you know, sometimes taken up within the kitchen or wherever it's put. How do you kind of educate them enough to incentivize them and show the benefits of the product and get that messaging across to justify not only the cost, but obviously the fact that you'd be adding another appliance into your kitchen.

Serge Liberman 06:39
It's adding and it's at the same time you're not you're not adding. It's still some kind of exchange, because you're adding the Food Cycler into your kitchen. You don't need your bin anymore, like your your regular waste bin, maybe just one for garbage. But in most, in most houses, you have at least two, and you can get rid, get rid of one, and you can have a nice one with no smell and no noise at the same time and no, you know, fruit flies or any, any other nasties like this. So, yeah, it's still, it's it's still about changing one to another. But I think that's a very right question, because my biggest, let's not call it struggle, let's call it challenge, is to educate people. Why do they need this appliance? It's, it's, it's a new niche. It's a new industry, relatively new. It just started maybe five years ago, overall. I mean, in the grand scale of things, and that's 80% of my work, building the brand awareness, building the understanding of why and how, and how useful it is in your day to day life, how one thing, for example, it reduces your organic waste volume by 90% so you don't, even if you live in a condo, not in the house, and you you have your shoot and, you know, it's super easy to go out your apartment and just get rid of it. You still need to, you know, get yourself up, go and smell and, you know, tie it and go outside. You don't necessarily want to go, especially in this weather, go out in your shell and do all this. But you can switch this little machine, which looks beautifully in your countertop or underneath it, and, yeah, and just, just keep it out of your mind forever. And then it's, it's then just 10% of what you put in, in terms of volume, you put it back in your bin, or you, you, you put it in a chute, and you don't need to have another thought about it. It's super easy. And that's exactly the message that we were translating to our potential future customers. Just and, you know, we're not, we're not doing any kind of professional product videos to justify all that. We just shoot regular lifestyle videos to see that. You know, it's regular people. They're doing the regular daily routine, and it's just helpful in your daily life. That's all.

Andrew Maff 09:30
What's like the top sales channel right now, because I know you listed several marketplaces, obviously, of your own website, like, Where, where are you seeing? Most of the movement right now?

Serge Liberman 09:41
I have a counter question, because it depends on the market, but let's, let's, let's keep it home in North America, it's definitely Amazon.

Andrew Maff 09:51
Yeah, are you? Do you lean really heavy under the Amazon side and use it as like a customer acquisition channel, and kind of look at more of an omni channel approach, or is it just like Amazon is is doing so much better than, let's say D2C that that's that's where your primary focus is.

Serge Liberman 10:09
Oh, it's not, it's not doing it's doing much better in terms of volume, 100% but in terms of overall look and feel and customer experience. Yeah no, D to C website is doing fantastic job, and in most cases right now, which is, I guess it's funny. Of course, Amazon has huge customer base, and it's 80% of E commerce in North America right now represents give or take in in small domestic appliances, but we have, on average, we have about two or three purchases from every customer. First, they buy it for themselves to give it a try, then they buy it for the family, for the friends and so on and so far, and even, even though two out of three first purchases are made from on Amazon. More than of 80% of second and third purchases are made on DTC site, which tells me the story that you know, they got acquainted with us on Amazon, but then they go back home and by where the experience is.

Andrew Maff 11:23
Yeah, yeah. I've always found Amazon's great for a customer acquisition channel. Obviously, the margins are always kind of tough. Is there any type of consumable element to it, any like filters or bags or anything like that, that keeps people coming back?

Serge Liberman 11:37
Yeah, that's a great question, because there are more new to come in the upcoming year, but yeah, for now, of course, because, as I said, it's orderless. It requires a carbon filter, and it should be refilled every three months. So that's one thing. You can always have an extra bucket. You can have a brush, because the brush is specifically designed to actually clean this exact pocket in just one smooth movement. So that's really helpful. And ramoto come the containers that will help you to, you know, properly mix it with with soil so you can use it as a fertilizer in spring and summer for your you know, in house plants in the backyard and so on and so far and some measuring cups and some other new, exciting consumables.

Narrator 12:36
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Andrew Maff 13:09
What like you'd mentioned the D to C side does a great job of kind of building the awareness they tend to start shopping with you on Amazon, then they go back to the D to C side for second and third purchases. On the D to C side with that initial kind of interaction with your customers. What channels are you seeing is working the best for you?

Serge Liberman 13:30
Again, it depends. It depends on the time of the year right now, paid search. When it's, it's paid search for grabbing the already created demand and then retargeting when it's let's say it's more calm and chill and regular overall. We always use Meta for creating awareness, but also for lead generation. Lead generation, I think, I mean, I'm familiar with it for 15 years, and I think it's been just reinvented again. And another thing is, you would assume, you know it's so much hype around AI right now, and specifically ChatGPT, but it's not just hype. I think it all has its foundation, and the foundation is the buy in the buy in audience and the audience that consulting with ChatGPT, it's really significant, at least across North America, and we basically focused one of our campaigns? Well, group of one, group of our campaigns during the T 12, previously, t5 but not t 12 of them, let's be honest, around this particular segment of people. And it was spectacular in terms of ROAS in terms of customer acquisition cost, ChatGPT and overall, artificial intelligence optimization, previously known as COO and now almost buried, is something that I'm looking forward to, I guess, from my very critical perspective. We got into it a little bit late. We just been playing with it for the last four months. And so far, it was incredible. You know, triple digit growth every second months and more to come.

Andrew Maff 15:39
Nice. You mentioned the lead generation side, which I love, because I think that it's wildly underutilized on a DTC side. Now, when you say lead generation, are you typically, when you say lead generation, you're thinking like you're generating, you know, someone's contact information. It gets handed off to more or less a sales team, and then they're kind of hounding that person until they get on a call with them or something. Are you referring to that? Or are you referring more to, like, just traditional email generation and allowing more, like a drip campaign concept?

Serge Liberman 16:13
I would say neither of them and half of each so we're basically yes, it's exactly the same, the same kind of thing we get the we get the contact information from the customers, and then we put it in our Klaviyo account, and we have a certain flows and certain chains and certain triggers up there, and it's ongoing communication with the customers. Sometimes they even provide their phone number, so they open for SMS pose as well. And we keep it super chill. We give more than well, I generally think this way that we give more than we take, because we provide a lot of scientifically proven content for our prospects and customers, just showing them. You know how you can use this fertilizer. How do you mix it? What's the use of it? Like alternative use for the machine, because sometimes you can do just dry spices with it, not just just reduce your waste so and with this useful content, and with incredible open rate, it's over 60% open rate right now on average for the lead generation campaign flows, Yeah, I think we're doing a decent job in just talking to our customers and giving them the useful information, and in return, with the conversion rate four times higher than on Amazon and D to C site blended, we get their purchases back.

Andrew Maff 18:00
Yeah, I love that you're doing that. There's so many brands we talked to that there's, there's no they're always going straight for the purchase. So, like, especially if they're running, like, Meta ads or something like that, the goal is, every campaign, the goal is a purchase. Is purchase, purchase. But a lot of times the products, especially if you're just educating yourself from a quick video on social media. It's like you got to further educate them and to adjust your approach to an email marketing kind of drip campaign or SMS, especially if you've got open rates that are like 40s, 50s, 60s, where you're getting that return, it makes so much more sense to lower that barrier to entry, give them some type of incentive to get them to sign up and then start to trigger those flows. So it's awesome that that's that's working for you, because I think it's a wildly underutilized strategy. What would you say is not working for you? What? What marketing strategies have you tried where you're like, ah, that didn't really work out. Like, I know, let's say, you know, if it's influencer marketing or SEO or obviously your email and SEM is doing well, or social ads, like anything along those lines that just, it's not just couldn't cut it, at least so far?

Serge Liberman 19:05
I will be honest and open. Andrew and Hey, Mark Zuckerberg, if you hear this, don't cancel me. God, man, it's not personal. We tried Meta for, you know, regular brand building, advertising display, video campaigns, deep segmentation. We used our first party data to build very tight segments of people, and, you know, try to get any kind of performance from this. It just Meta is just not there, but we're utilizing it really well for like evergreen campaigns and product videos and lead generation. So that's but yeah, performance wise, you know, conversion rate wise, revenue wise, it's just not there.

Andrew Maff 20:00
Yeah, yeah. And look it's, it's great that you guys figured that out and still were able to pivot to more that lead gen side and make it work for you. There's so many brands, I think, that just completely give up on platforms and not think outside the box of, hey, maybe don't go for a purchase. Just go for the email generation, or go for, you know, the awareness or something along those lines. Do more top of funnel. You mentioned that you're doing a lot on the search engine side. Have you done anything through like YouTube ads or anything like that?

Serge Liberman 20:27
Sure, yeah, because we have a lot of UGC content.

Andrew Maff 20:37
I lost for a second there. I lost so I was curious about the YouTube side, and then I lost you for a second there, but I got you now.

Serge Liberman 20:44
Okay, perfect. Yeah, we do a lot of UGC videos, and we collaborate with many influencers who provide a lot of content for us, so we definitely use it on YouTube. And there are basically two products that I use on YouTube and that work really well for us, shorts. Shorts is a no brainer. There is no longer story to this. And of course, the true view videos like six seconds, non skippable, especially if you use the shoppable ones that works fantastic or currently on Smart TV, you can even pass the link back to your device, whatever using so it works really well. It It has its specifics when we're talking about audience, and it has its own targeting, its own segment of people, but as long as you're able to find it and test it properly, because, let's be honest, it's 22 it's almost 2026 digital marketing is still all about testing. There are no right answers. You just it's about pace. It's about frequency. It's about testing and interpreting, interpreting your results.

Andrew Maff 22:08
Preach! Beautiful Serge, I really appreciate you being on the show. I know you're super busy. I don't want to take up any more time, especially wrapping up the year. I would love to give you the floor let everyone know where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Food Cycler.

Serge Liberman 22:21
100% thank you again, Andrew. Love to be on the show and yeah, super happy to chat about digital marketing and Food Cycler specifically, you can check everything about the product on www.foodcycler.com and please feel free to add me in contacts on LinkedIn and happy to chat.

Andrew Maff 22:43
Beautiful. Thank you, sir. Appreciate having you on the show. Everyone who tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate, review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us. See you all next time. Have a good one!

Narrator 23:02
Thank you for tuning in to the Ecomm Show. Head over to Ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTusker YouTube channel. The E comm show is brought to you by BlueTusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to Bluetusker.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show!