An Interview with Ruaraidh Grubb, CEO of Own-Kind

In this episode, Bryan Amaral interviews  Ruaraidh ("Rory") Grubb, CEO of Own-Kind, a UK-based clienteling and customer-engagement platform. Rory traces Own-Kind’s evolution from a 2018 “digital wardrobe” concept to a post-lockdown product-market fit that helps retailers deliver exceptional, content-rich customer experiences. Framing clienteling as a practice supported by software, Rory explains how Own-Kind shortens time-to-value for store associates and customers through personalized, shoppable lookbooks, QR-enabled onboarding, and engagement telemetry that surfaces purchase intent and prompts timely human follow-ups.

Bryan and Rory dig into real outcomes and adoption: streamlined integrations (including Shopify), 1:1 onboarding for every user, and results reported by brands such as 2–4× higher conversion and 3× AOV, with rapid ROI. They also explore the road ahead—supporting in-store events with sales attribution, instant chat, social modules, and an enhanced appointments flow—and how AI should remove admin and amplify people rather than replace them, keeping associates at the center of the relationship.

Key takeaways

1. Clienteling is a practice — Software should enhance associate engagement, and empower better human moments.
2. Content drives engagement — Personalized, video-rich lookbooks + clickstream insight reveal intent before purchase and is the entry point into creating high-value customer journeys.
3. Adoption by design — 1:1 user onboarding provide real-world insights into how technology supports retail selling and constant UX iteration lower friction and speed results.
4. Plug-and-play where possible — Streamlined integrations (incl. Shopify) reduce IT lift and time to go-live.
5. Measured impact — Brands report rapid ROI, 2–4× conversion, and 3× AOV; retention is the next frontier to quantify.
6. Human + AI balance — Use AI/agents to suggest next best actions and remove admin while the associate stays in the loop.

Enjoy the show!

 Own-Kind Website: www.own-kind.com

Ruaraidh's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruaraidhgrubb/

Bryan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanamaral/

Bryan’s Website: https://www.clientricity.net

Bryan’s Email: bryan@clientelingpodcast.com or bryan@retailtechexec.com

Call Bryan: 404-348-4849 

Tags: retail clienteling clientricity Own-Kind retailtransformation

Transcript

Bryan: 0:08

Hello everyone, I'm Bryan Amaral, and welcome to the clientelling podcast. In each episode, we'll be talking to the retail industry's most knowledgeable and successful executives, those luminaries that are creating value at the intersection of retail and technology. In every episode, you'll hear about new, innovative, and transformational customer-centric ideas that are redefining shopping and creating high-value customer experiences. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and let your friends know by liking us on social media. So, let's get on with the show. Well, hello again, and it's great to be back. We have a very exciting show today with Rory Grubb, who is the CEO of Ownkind from the UK. You know, I learned about his company through one of his advisors while I was having a conversation at NRF back in January. And when I later talked to Rory, I could immediately see he was doing something different. He had a very unique perspective and had a story candidly that I think my audience would want to hear. So before I actually bring him on here, I want to tell you a few things about Rory. He's from the UK, as I mentioned. He actually spent a few years as a lawyer before getting an MBA and then launching Ownkind in 2018. This Renaissance man speaks four languages. He's lived in various places in France, Spain, as well as the UK, where he's now based. He's based in London. So we're going to have a really interesting guy to talk to here. And hello, Rory.

Rory: 1:38

Hi, Bryan. Very, very excited to be here. Thank you for having me on. Very, very excited to be speaking to the godfather of clientele.

Bryan: 1:47

It's better than grandfather. Um, anyhow, you know, given your somewhat diverse background, I am really excited to hear your story today, and I'm sure everybody else is. So, and you know, I've seen your product, I've heard about all these great results that your clients are getting, very, very impressive business impact. And um, we're gonna get into all of that in just a minute. But first, I really do want to go into this origin story. Uh, you know, what was that spark that made you want to start own kind and make the shifts that you've made in your career and then build this solution? And I I'm gonna say it because I've done it, you know, what made you want to take this crazy entrepreneurial journey into retail?

Rory: 2:25

Um, so I think it's definitely always been an itch that I wanted to scratch. Uh, a university, a friend and I kind of did various entrepreneurial things. We we imported caram boards from India and sold them across the UK. I've set up a speaker rental business while at uni and did a couple of other little things. Um, so yeah, I think it was definitely somewhere I always wanted to go and I've always loved retail. I love kind of humans and understanding humans, I love human psychology, but I wouldn't say it came together that kind of directly. I um on leaving uni, I decided to become a lawyer. This was back kind of 2009, so you know, things were pretty unstable, and I got an internship at a law firm in Spain, and it just seemed quite like a kind of safe, stable choice. So, yeah, I kind of plugged for that after university, qualified, and then realized that it that it just wasn't a fit for me. So I started kind of plotting my way out, and then yeah, hence the the MBA in Spain, and then while I was out there again, got involved in a lot of kind of entrepreneurial things. I worked on a project to commercialize a compression engine for low-orbit satellites. I worked on a go-to-market for a juice cleanse company that was trying to break into new markets in Europe. I did a summer internship at a company called Drover that later got acquired by I think Kazoo, who were kind of doing you know urban mobility stuff. Um was really cool. And then yeah, I always wanted to do something like kind of say in retail and I'm selling entrepreneur. So after all of that, I set up uh to set up with his own kinds.

Bryan: 3:59

Well, that's great. Tell me a little bit about the original problems that you really had in mind that you were trying to solve for retailers, for the brands and the customers. What was that original vision? And then I guess the other question is did that vision change over time?

Rory: 4:14

For sure. I mean, we started out with a very, very different product and business. So the original idea was for a digital wardrobe back in 2018. So the idea would be to be everything in between your kind of your first-hand platforms and then your resale platforms, right? So somewhere that you could you could take that data profile and your net reporters and far fetchers and stuff could use it to give you a better, kind of more detailed experience. They could style you with your own pieces, and then once you are finished with your items, as well as being able to, you know, style yourself, share outfits with friends from within the platform, you could then feed those items directly into resale platforms. For a number of reasons, that was really, really hard, and we realized that that wasn't going to take off. So we iterated across, and it was only really coming out of lockdown. So 2021, where we got our first kind of real opportunity. We got introduced to someone at Stella McCartney, and at the time they had all these incredible staff who were still in stores, but the store experience itself was horrible, right? You know, you could only go in two people at a time, you had to wear a face mask, you had to sanitize your hands. So they wanted more of a kind of a sales outreach tool. So we took elements of what we'd done, repurposed it, and that's where we probably found our first bit of product market fit. Um, and yeah, it's kind of then gone from gone from there.

Bryan: 5:34

That's great. That's great. And I want to hear more about these customers as we kind of go through and kind of what the success stories look like. Um yeah, I thought we might talk a little bit about how you define the category. You know, I mean, go out of your website, I've seen a lot of your materials. Your marketing kind of describes what you do as clientele, CRM, customer engagement, because it's a combination of things that you have in the lookbooks. But I've always said that clientelling is really more of a practice than it is a product, right? A lot of people go, you know, and and by the way, the the misuse of the word clientelling, I mean, it is it's awful, right? I mean, it's one of my pet peeves, right? But but you know, how do you frame what it is that you do for the brands that you work with?

Rory: 6:17

Yeah, so I guess we think of it as using data and software to deliver a really, really exceptional customer experience. And if you get that right, then everything else flows, you know, more sales, better sales conversion, better, better brand positioning, which leads to pricing power, better customer attention. So if you can do that, then uh then everything else flows. So, you know, rather than looking at the labels, we we always kind of go back to those core practices. And so our job from a software point of view and from a kind of option on boarding point of view, like you say, it's it's a practice, is how can we shorten that time to value? How can we make it as quick and easy to deliver a really, really exceptional customer experience? So that's our that's our goal, really.

Bryan: 7:02

Yeah, okay, great. So obviously, we're I think we're aligned philosophically about how do you create value by leveraging those components we've talked about here. So help me understand what the solution really does to make that happen. Maybe you can give me at a high level, we don't want to go too too deep into this, but give me the an idea of the buckets of capability that are making that all happen.

Rory: 7:24

Yeah, definitely. So I guess what we want to do is make it quicker and easier to make every customer touch point as good as it can possibly be, right? And a customer touch point could be when a customer walks into store. It could be when they pick up, if you send out like my law of catalogs, it could be when they pick up one of those, it could be if they come to an event, if they register for an in-store appointment, it could be doing sales outreach from in-store. So each time you come into contact with your customers, we want to empower the brand to deliver the best possible customer experience. So just zeroing in on a couple of those touch points. Uh, let's take the brochure, for example. We have a QR code, which you can print onto your brochures, which when the customer scans it opens up a branded onboarding experience and allows the customer to do things like request a personalized lookbook, book an in-store appointment, submit a request to a sales advisor so that they can respond to them via text and give them really personalized advice via text if that's their favorite communication channel. Taking another example, uh, let's say sales outreach. Our app allows sales advisors either centrally at the brand level or locally to create really beautiful content that can feature videos, multiple product views, pricing information, campaign imagery, outfit collages, and send it to customers on a one-to-one or a one-to-many basis, but still on a really personalized way. So for each customer, it's going to have the name on the cover, it's going to have that top quality imagery. We've done tons of work to optimize the loading time so that they get to see the best quality imagery, but in the shortest time possible. And then what's really important about that is that we collect all of that customer engagement data and we feed it back to the brand and to the sales advisor. But not only that, we index it for purchase intent and for a kind of engagement level. So if you're the customer, you're not getting blind outreach or blind follow-ups. Like there's always going to be a reason that you're receiving something.

Bryan: 9:23

Right. You've got this learning loop that you're using in order to improve the engagement with the customer on an ongoing basis.

Rory: 9:29

Exactly. So we're basically taking the guess or our code for the sales advisor. These are your customers who actually are engaged, and this is what they're engaged with, and this is where they're kind of at in the in their purchasing journey. And then for the customers, just make it much more personalized so that if you are receiving an outreach, it should be relevant to you. It should be relevant to your interests, and it should be relevant to your geography, yeah, what you're currently doing. So just make everything is about making it as quick and easy as possible for the for the brand to live the best possible customer experience.

Bryan: 9:59

Yeah, that's that's great. You know, um, I think I said to you one day, I've been in the client telling space since people were arguing about how many L's were in the word client telling. Seven. Right. By the way, I won on that one. I'll have you know when this when the second vendor came in the space, I actually didn't know it's one L, not twos at the end of that word. Uh, but in any event. But the idea of empowering associates to do a better job, you know, engaging clients before, during, and after the sale isn't a new idea. The way you're approaching it is is certainly different than a lot of the vendors out there. I mean, there are like three, two or three key differentiators that you think you're bringing to the table that are either under-delivered in some of the older legacy programs that were never there, or maybe even some of the newer things that are out there that really are differentiated. And I wanted to understand is this something that can be an add-on, let's say for a homegrown or maybe even a third-party vendor solution where you could add value to their existing, some of those more traditional clientele workflows that may already be in place in the organization?

Rory: 11:00

Yeah, 100%. So I think the, you know, the way that we got here coming from a different initial product has meant that we've always taken a very, very unbiased view of things, right? And I think we've always looked at things of like, okay, we're not, we haven't looked at existing solutions and gone, okay, well, let's build our own version, but for a different customer or something. We've always started from first principles and built on top of that. So I think things like the content module that I just mentioned and the customer engagement data and the purchase indexing is pretty like top of class, from what I understand. And I think that's validated by the fact that that module is actually used alongside some of the big uh clientele players in the industry for some of the kind of biggest luxury brands in the world and has delivered really, really exceptional results. You know, anything from doubling sales conversion up to quadrupling sales conversion and tripling average order value. So definitely those bits I think are really unique. And I think, yeah, so I think what makes us different is that we've just taken a very unbiased, very everything must be validated approach. And that's yeah, left definitely led to us building some some different capabilities.

Bryan: 12:08

Okay, as you keep talking, I keep coming up with more questions, but I'm not going to go into all of them because we'll be on here for like two hours. Um but I wanted to talk a little bit about the headwinds, right? Like we all know that implementing change in a retailer with a technology stack that requires some kind of behavioral shifts or learning new tactics, let's call it, for people to operate in the store is always, you know, what are the biggest obstacles and challenges you've seen and how are you overcoming that? What did you think about in your solutions as a way to make that change adoption, I guess I would say, easier?

Rory: 12:42

So I think I think you said something earlier that's really on point, which is that clientelling is a practice, not just a product, right? So, you know, definitely one big piece of potential friction is onboarding. You know, it doesn't matter how like how good your product is, you've got to understand the user's motivation, which is your sales advisor or your online stylist. And one thing that we do is we usually, almost always, we do a one-to-one onboarding call with every single person who's going to use our platform. And we do it in the style of a user experience test. So it's two parts. In the first part, we ask them what a day in their life look like? What do they want our app to do for them? And the second point, we get they we've given them their login details, we get them to share their screen and go and walk through the app. That has been so valuable, not only because we think it's the best possible way to train an onboard, right? Because people are doing things in the way that they want to, in the way that they're used to. But also every time we do this, and we've done many thousands of these onboarding calls now, we learn something new. We see something new. We get people to say, like, you know, please say whatever crosses your mind. So we're always, always learning. And I think where you see that pay off is if you look at the kind of the number of updates that we release, we're always tweaking, always finessing. And I think you know, the user experience of our app, we're really, really proud of um where we got it to, and you know, we're still always tweaking it. So, yeah, so I think onboarding is definitely one piece of potential friction. And then in terms of other headwinds, yeah, I guess like integrations is always always going to be a bottleneck. Yeah, how are we looking at that? We have been able to streamline, we actually use a platform now that allows us to standardize a lot of our integrations. We've got a ton of integrations now where essentially are now kind of plug and play, and we have a Shopify app, for example. So that means that for brands are using Shopify, it's basically literally like a five-minute installation calling them more or less good to go. So, yeah, those are probably the two biggest that we've been working on.

Bryan: 14:38

So it's not a huge lift for an IT organization to integrate you with their inventory or their POS or obviously e-commerce besides Shopify. It's it's not a huge lift.

Rory: 14:50

No, definitely not. And usually we'll do we'll do all of the mapping and stuff on our side, which means that we're not going to ask them to change their structure if that's remotely possible. We will basically map our integrations to their existing structure. So, more or less, we just need like access to their test environment, and then we can crack on, and then we can usually deliver something after a couple of weeks.

Bryan: 15:14

All right, that's great. That's great. Well, that kind of leads me to my next question. So, one of the most impressive things when I first saw your demo is the way that you have incorporated content, the shoppable lookbook, and all that interactive content as kind of a that first-touch engagement in many respects, right, with the customer to kind of start them and you're in your tracking all of that. Clienteling, you know, there's a lot of different functional areas of what I've got kind of this map that I use in the industry around customer data and task and communications, and then all of these product and content pieces and all these other workflows that may need to get supported with task and communications. There's a lot of pieces to all of this. Um, but it seems as though content is becoming more and more important. And I think we're going to be seeing some other technologies that are going to be making new workflows we probably haven't seen before in terms of engagement starting to come, which we'll talk about in a minute. But very briefly, maybe you can tell me a little bit about how you see the role of content in clientele and how are those insights that come from the engagement at that earlier stage, particularly being used to drive further value.

Rory: 16:20

Yeah, so I think content, especially in like fashion or interior, is incredibly important. Yeah, you know, that's very much like a large part of it. So from our point of view, like the job is to deliver the best possible, the most engaging, most crystal clear, the best video or like the best cut of a video in the lowest friction way. So we think a lot about loading times, for example, and brown's ability. Um, so it's it's super, super important. If you want to deliver an elevated customer experience, then content is incredibly important. And obviously that feeds through into brand, which feeds into retention, price and power, everything. Super, super important. And then, yeah, how do some of those touch points feed through? So we collect data on everything. So did the customer, what did they click on? What did they open the lookbook? Did they respond to the text? Did they look at multiple product views? Did they watch video? How long for we to we collect all of that really, really important data? We've got so much of it now that we're able to spot patterns. Yep. And so we start with our benchmarks, and then we're able to kind of finesse once we've been working for a brand for a while, we can look into their data and kind of update those purchase intent levels. And like you said, I think how else does that factor in? One of the things that we do, and you mentioned tasks being one of the kind of tenants of functionality, is we'll set a purchase intent level, and then if a customer passes that according to their engagement data, we'll automate a follow-up task for the relevant sales advisor who's reached out to them or who owns that client within their client book to follow up with that customer and show them which products they're most engaged with. And we also have things like what we call the see the looks function, which will allow them to look for kind of quality controlled content within the platform, right? Featuring that item, and then they can just send you to the customer in a couple of clicks. So if you step back and look at what their customer journey is, I'm interested in, let's say, a pair of trousers. So I engage with those pair of trousers, I check them out, I have a look, I'm not quite sure. The next touch point that I might get is a separate look or a separate notebook featuring that uh that pair of trousers, styled three different ways, with maybe some video in there from my sales advisor going out. Hey, I saw you're interested in those trousers. Here are some other ways that I think are quite cool to style it. Did you have any event coming up for or whatever? Yeah. Let me know if you have any questions. That's great.

Bryan: 18:42

You know, in the past, we could only do that after purchase history, right? I mean, like good clientele systems would leverage the purchase history and say, Oh, we can do an upsell and a cross-sell from this because I actually transacted that. But because you're engaging earlier in the process and actually tracking that click stream, we get intent very clear, even though there hasn't been a monetary transaction, you know, with with the brand on that particular SKU. And then we you're able to leverage that in order to create. And now, and once you start to show outfits, we know the conversion on that, right? It it's you know, when you put together a collection, a lot of people can't visualize. Uh you know, is what I've I've come to realize. I was an image consultant at one point. I gotta tell you, some people really cannot visualize.

Rory: 19:23

I'm probably one of them, to be honest. So I think, you know, if it wasn't for my wife, I'd get dressed in the dark every day. But no, I th I think so, and just to a couple of things to build on that, I think really important as well, and that we really noticed as well. Like customers really value newness. So when you've got, especially your kind of like your VIP customers, they've probably seen your socials, they've probably seen all your campaigns, they've been on your website, they've seen all of that beautiful content that you've got to great time and expense to shoot. So putting together these look books and styling different looks, you're showing them something new, and it comes through with their name on it. So it feels incredibly personalized, right, incredibly engaging, incredibly interactive. That's a really good experience for the customer, and it's got that newness as well. And the other thing that I just thought of about what you were saying as well is that if we think about purchase, uh, you know, purchase intent as a journey leading up to purchase intent, you know, leading up to making a purchase, it's going up, right? But then as the customer disengages, they get kind of less hot, right? And that purchase intent drops off. After they've made the purchase, which, like you say, is the typical let's reach out to them and try and upsell because they've just bought something. Well, we expect to see purchase and don't drop right off, right? Because they've just scratched that itch, they've just fulfilled that need, they've made the purchase, they're happy, they're like, cool, I'm not in that purchasing mind frame anymore. But so arguably there's a lot more value to be got from catching them pre-purchase on that journey and just before they drop off, right? Before they're like, and I wanted to, and I've forgotten about it. If we can catch them there, then you know, then that's absolutely providing a lot of value.

Bryan: 20:54

Absolutely. And I'm not gonna go too deep into this because we are probably gonna go way over time, and I may have let us do that because this is great stuff. But just being upfront, I had an idea of how long these things were gonna take, but the content is great, so let's just keep going. But maybe you could talk a little bit about which KPIs are really resonating with customers. I know you do a lot of tracking of all the what are the KPIs that are really resonating?

Rory: 21:17

Yeah, so ROI is the one that you probably see like at the moment we're publishing about a case study a week at the moment, showing ROIs, you know, around the kind of 40x mark after literally just like a couple of months of usage. So yeah, ROI, and then we look at that as like incremental sales divided by contract value. So that is obviously a key one. The one that is really, really important to us is retention, but it's so much harder to measure because you know, increases in retention. So that's one that we think about a lot. But yeah, if we're really delivering the exceptional customer experience that we aim to and that we think we are, then customers do keep coming back. It's it can just be a bit harder to pull that data and you need a longer time frame, cohort analyses and stuff like that. And it's kind of harder to separate out all the different interactions and customer touch points. But yeah, so we look at ROI, uh, we look at sales conversion increase, we look at average order value increase, and then yeah, we're super interested in our.

Bryan: 22:13

And all of those lead up, of course, to the reportable numbers, right? I mean, at the end of the day, all of those things are impacting either top line revenue or margin, right? Or and or cost savings may be some things, I don't know. But but at the end of the day, we're all trying to drive traffic, increase conversion, and increase average transaction size and frequency. Those are the kinds of things that retailers are looking at and that ultimately drive ROI. But there are also some softer metrics, right? Like the more outreach that they do, the number of communications, the number of behaviors in certain ways that an associate does in the store ultimately drives those other numbers, right? Are you seeing retailers track some of those softer metrics?

Rory: 22:50

Definitely. I think you touch on a really interesting point here, because I think that you can get a lot from those softer metrics. You know, ideally, we want a higher conversion rate and maybe a slightly lower outreach rate, and we want a higher open rate, right? Because that because that all indicates quality. And we don't want to get to that place where we're extending too much outreach or too many communications to customers and it's you know, and it risk becoming a turn off. But the data that we collect helps feed into that. So, for example, our open rates, we have benchmarks on a brand-by-brand basis that we can then use to analyze individual sales advisor performance to go like, okay, well, look, let's take a look at the outreach, which you can see, one of the content within the platform, and let's see why we're getting lower kind of engagement rates here, and let's see what we can do to improve that and thereby improve customer experience across the board.

Bryan: 23:37

All right, great, super. I suspect it's going to be all positive, but I'm going to ask the question anyhow. There's qualitative feedback. What are you hearing back from associates and from customers?

Rory: 23:47

So we yeah, we're really, really pleased with the feedback we're hearing. Ease of use is a big one that we get. And I think that is testament to, like I say, the amount of onboarding calls that we do. We're always, always, always getting live feedback from our end user, which is sales advisors. You know, everything is typically one click away, which is super useful. And you know, that sounds easy to do, like you know, to build a good product. It in reality, it can be very, very hard. So you're really pleased with that. And then, yeah, again, the quality of the content, the interactivity, and then the results. You know, we're really, really pleased with the ROIs that we're generating. That's great, obviously.

Bryan: 24:25

Um you'd want to share, kind of like what success looks like inside of one of these doors.

Rory: 24:31

What success looks like. So I guess the time to value question is the core user motivation. Yeah. So we think a lot about what makes sales advisors happy. So we definitely want to make sure that we are helping them deliver on their targets, that we are helping them hopefully earn some commission where they can. So that's super important. And then also, like, as as you've made, as you've made a very good point, like this is this is a human business, yes, powered by software, but it's a human business. So we love being able to like go into stores, jump on corners, get more feedback, maybe drop up some pastries if we can.

Bryan: 25:05

And um true one-to-one engagement, you know, the the vendors coming right into the store with breakfast. I love it.

Rory: 25:12

That's uh practicing what we preach. Yeah, yeah.

Bryan: 25:15

No, it's that's great. I'm I'm a proponent of all of that. Okay, let's talk a little bit more about some story stuff here. I know personally, and anybody who has ever built a tech company knows that it is really not easy. Wanted to know what do you think has been the biggest challenge for you and what surprised you the most, positively or negatively?

Rory: 25:34

So I think the biggest challenge for us is that so I would say that we've been really, really strong on product, but we still are pretty small team. And I would say that where we are now putting a lot more of our attention, now we now we have strong evidence to support really, really strong product market fit. We're growing really fast as it is, but I would say that brand awareness and kind of market awareness is probably the thing that we're thinking about most at the moment. We're getting a ton of inbounds, but it's mostly word of mouth. Yeah, so we're starting to think about marketing a lot more. Yeah, I think like it's it's a very noisy industry, you know, it's not just clientelling, it's like software in the city.

Bryan: 26:13

That dollar, that dollar is that there are there are 50 categories looking for the same dollar you're selling into, right?

Rory: 26:19

Yeah, exactly. So do you so definitely that how do we kind of stand up? Because once we once we get people on the call and show them on a demo, we have a really high kind of conversion rate of getting the brands into pilots and then a really and then really strong kind of pilot conversion rate. But yeah, so it's just that kind of like getting our name out there when it's so busy and there are so many people. Retail is hard to sell into.

Bryan: 26:38

You know, I have um I have a college-age son who is somehow it must have been genetic because he's got all of a sudden got a love of luxury retail, right? And I'm like, no, no, you're going to a great school, you'll get a job on Wall Street, or you'll get a job to consult, you know, with McKinsey or something. Do not go into retail. And uh, but but he absolutely, you know, loves it. And I'm you know, you sit back and you're like, it's you have to realize that, you know, retailers are a really tough market. I mean, the retail industry, when times are good, they don't think they need stuff. And when times are bad, they can't afford it. So it's this constant challenge at trying to find and retail math impacts it as well, right? So I mean, it's like, hey, that's not that expensive per store, but I have a thousand stores. All of a sudden, I can open a lot of stores for what it costs to put that in a thousand stores. Is that the best return on my investment? And so technology vendors are constantly fighting that. And then early stage technology best investors, while they're trying to get a category going, sometimes, honestly, sometimes the business isn't there early enough. They can't get enough rounds of capital and they die, they die in the vine, which is always unfortunate when you see good stuff. But I'm so glad that things are going as well as they are for you. I want to talk a little bit more about some big changes happening in general in the tech space, right? So you've built this tool for deeply personalized client relationships. But I'm having a lot of conversations around this, and I wanted to know like how do you think about balancing automation and the human touch? You know, over here, retailers are really having a hard time figuring that out right now. And how do you make sure that the human is staying at the center of these technology products that you're you're building today and delivering as well as the things you're thinking about for the future?

Rory: 28:22

So for us, it always goes back to that core kind of principle of time to value. So, how can we make it? How can we remove all of the all of the admin and all of the faffing about and make it so that it's ideally we want our sales advisor to pick up a phone, to see a notification from us that's a well-timed task, hit take action, complete it within a couple of seconds, and deliver a really beautiful customer experience. That's always the vision and the mission. So that's always, always what we're working towards. So, yeah, that's it. Like remove all of the unnecessary work, cleanest, shortest possible time to value for the sales device.

Bryan: 29:00

Okay, great. I did have one question. It's like a lot of people misunderstand what this stuff is, partially because this category is just not that clear in people's minds often enough, the people that are making business decisions. What are some of the misconceptions about clientele and about own kind that you're seeing out there?

Rory: 29:18

So, you know, we sometimes have client calls where they'll say, like, oh, you know, clientele is clientelling. It's really not. I would say that there's a lot of there's a lot of differences. You know, there are so many. If you think about, you know, all the different customer touch points and you know, the the different approaches that you could take to software to support and kind of power those touch points, that that there are a lot of differences out there. And our content module, that's obviously a core part of, you know, we can be like the whole singing and dancing thing, or that content module can just provide a lot of value by itself. That delivers so much value, and that that just doesn't exist in most other platforms that I'm aware of. So I think that I would definitely say that not, it's not just like. A kind of one size fits all, and it doesn't matter if you buy your clientele software from A or B. I would say it does matter. Yeah. And I think we also don't want it to just become too standardized as well, right? You know, just a post-purchase two days later, we're going to send them the same text template. We definitely still want to get, you know, let's not be lazy, let's not go to that place. So I think always we want to be thinking about okay, well, how can we personalize especially with the AI and stuff that we have at our disposal now? There are some really, really amazing things that that we can be doing.

Bryan: 30:31

Well, let's talk about what are the features, modules, and directions that you're excited about. Because I I know where you're going with that in your head already. I can see it. So go ahead and talk about it.

Rory: 30:39

Yeah, 100%. So with the kind of the AI tools that are out there now, we've really been able to speed up our development, which has been really, really exciting. So I've got a couple of things in the works. We've got an events module coming out literally either this week or next, which kind of like pay plus posts, but with sales attribution, allows the brand to send out the build audiences, send the invite to those audiences, register purchases, see very quick, clearly needs their ROI on each of their events. We're working on an instant chat module. We are working on a social media module, we've made improvements to our appointment booking module. So yeah, a lot, a lot of stuff that is getting supercharged at the moment.

Bryan: 31:19

That's great. You know, are there any other emerging tech? I mean, obviously, AI at a generative layup level, you know, we kind of can all see how it can help. But what are the things out there that you think are going to have bearing? And what do you think if you had a crystal ball? What do you think it's all going to look like five years from now?

Rory: 31:36

Yeah. So no, I definitely think AI is the most powerful thing. You know, AR and VR, we've seen some quite cool stuff out there, you know, being able to see like a digital watch on your arm, sneakers, you know, if you hold your phone over. I think that's cool. But I think that AI is so pervasive, it's going to be in everything from software development to customer experience to data manipulation to data visualization. I think it's just going to be super, super pervasive. I don't think anything else comes close. I think that in five years, we we've seen a bit of whiplash, for example, if you look at I'm gonna forget their name now, who the instant, the Swedish, the Oklahoma, how you know they they fired 700 customer experience reps and then replace them with a kind of customer experience bot, then hide a bunch of them back. Yeah, I think that realistically there are some really good kind of like instant chat bots out there, you know. So when you land on a website, you can actually get really good advice from an AI bot now. I think realistically, we do start to see a bit more of that, and you know, especially when sales are.

Bryan: 32:43

There are some interesting things happening. As a matter of fact, I have somebody that I'm working with right now that is doing stuff and it's they're doing it in hard lines right now, it's not being done in the more traditional, you know, soft lines or luxury or beauty kind of categories, but they're able to do an extraordinary job approximating in certain workflows the very kind of stuff, consultative stuff. And and it requires a deep understanding and building the right models and all the rest of it. I mean, I think we're gonna see a lot of that go in there, but I don't think we want to get to a place where human beings aren't part of the equation.

Rory: 33:15

Totally agree. You know, no, totally agree. I think it I think it always becomes supportive. So I think we're gonna say AI agents almost being layered into many different parts of the stack, right? To kind of like support the sales advice, everything from like, you know, what next step should I take, or which of my customers do you think has a high level of purchase intent, or who should I reach out to today to you know help me understand this data? To yeah, I just I think it almost becomes almost how social media became a layer, right? And you had social media layered into fitness apps and commerce platforms and stuff. I I think probably the same thing happens with AI agents. So yeah, that would be my biggest probably most obvious.

Bryan: 33:57

Right. I'm gonna move along to the next section here of questions that I have. We aren't gonna get all of these things done, but this is a fun one, okay? I've never done this before, and I'm hoping that this goes well. What we're gonna do here is I'm calling it the lightning round. Okay, okay. So as we kind of wrap things up, so you got to be quick, or else you're gonna everybody here is gonna suffer by hearing me impersonate a buzzer. Okay. So I want you know, just a very, very short response, and it's supposed to be fun. Okay, so I'm gonna give you a choice here. If own kind had either a motto or a mascot, what would it be?

Rory: 34:32

Uh, motto is exceptional customer experience, and our mascot is a key for unlocking value.

Bryan: 34:38

Ooh. That just comes to you. That's good. All right. There's one misconception about clientele you'd like to correct.

Rory: 34:47

Um, that it's a one-size-fits-all.

Bryan: 34:49

Oh, okay, great, great. You've mentioned that before. Uh, what book, blog, or podcast has influenced you? It doesn't have to be my podcast, but what book, blog, or podcast has influenced you the most?

Rory: 35:00

Well, obviously would have been your podcast, but now you're taking that away from me. Um, I would say Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, uh by Daniel Kahneman. Yeah, great, great run. Yeah. Just, you know, it's, I mean, there is so much richness in that. I think about that so much in terms of human psychology.

Bryan: 35:16

I have it right up here behind me somewhere. Yeah.

Rory: 35:18

Yeah. Uh, and you know, product design, how we think, how we feel, yeah, all of that. It just such an incredible book.

Bryan: 35:25

Okay, great. What do you wish more retail execs knew about clientele?

Rory: 35:31

Um, the results, I always say, uh, you know, I really do think it is an essential, you know. I think it the the space is so competitive now. I think that it's so easy to fall into like a discounting death spiral. And I think the clientelling is the thing that helps you stay above that, maintain brand, maintain pricing power, sell at full price. Uh, yeah.

Bryan: 35:54

So sell value. All right. What are you most excited about this year?

Rory: 35:58

Oh, um, a lot of the releases that we've got coming out. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, probably that. Is that am I meant to give a personal experience? Well, you could give a personal one. I mean, I'll let you do two on this one if you want. So, so boring. What are you excited about? Work. Um, on the on the personal front, uh my wife and I are going to Japan where I've never been to, it's been on a bucket list ever. So that that I think is going to be weird.

Bryan: 36:26

That is the only place I ever truly felt that I had zero skills to function uh without a handler. I'll tell you that story some other time, but I almost didn't get back to my hotel. All right. And then the final one is what is the funniest cultural or retail terminology difference that you've run into dealing with the US?

Rory: 36:47

So I would say maybe not just the US, but and I don't know if this counts as terminology, but I um if I'm feeling uh really cruel, I quite like to watch someone I haven't met before trying to navigate my name. And either they kind of have a gut at the beginning of the like, it's rr, rr. Well, that's real.

Bryan: 37:05

I have I actually phonetically spelled your name in front of me here to make sure I didn't try to translate it. Rory is quite easy to say if we use the the other spelling of it. Yeah, it's um it'll be in the show notes, folks, if you want to see how you really spell this thing. It uh it it's it's not an easy one to get through. Okay, that was great. Thank you. All right, so it's really kind of all the time that we have today. We're coming up on 40 minutes here. I really appreciate, honestly, more than you know, to taking the time to join us, share your story about own kind. I was impressed with it the first time I saw it. Every interaction I've had, I've become more and more impressed with the way that you're you're managing this company and the way that you're growing it and the value you're delivering to retailers. If a retailer was curious, wants to learn more, where should they go?

Rory: 37:50

Uh, find me on LinkedIn. Again, you know, I wish I had a slightly simpler name for that. But yeah, definitely find me on LinkedIn and hopefully you could really kindly put a link in the bio and you can put it in the link. I'll put it right in the show notes. Yep. Perfect. And then, yeah, I've got a book and appointment thing, so you can just book a demo. And yeah, we'd love to meet in the website.

Bryan: 38:07

And the website as well, right?

Rory: 38:08

So you can book a demo for the website as well.

Bryan: 38:11

All right, I'll put that all in there. Um, you know, this has been great. This audience that that follows me knows that I love shining a light on tools and practices that are really making customer experience, creating what's possible in retail customer experience. So I'm always enjoying this kind of thing. Do you have any parting words of wisdom for our listeners?

Rory: 38:33

Well, what I don't know about words of wisdom, we're definitely trying to learn a lot more than yeah, we're always trying to learn. So it's been really cool to get to chat to you and not just today, but uh yeah, kind of lean into your experience. I really value that. So thank you. Thank you for the chance to come on today. But yeah, I don't know. We are just obsessed with shortening time to value. So everything that we think about is making it quicker, easier to deliver really, really exceptional customer experience.

Bryan: 38:58

Well, that's great. Well, listen, everybody, thank you very much for listening to today's show. I'm wishing all of you just great retail experiences. Rory, such a pleasure. I'm hope to talk to you again soon. Thank you so much. I've loved it. All right, bye-bye. Well, that's today's show. Thank you for listening. If you like what you heard, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and like us on social media. Or drop me a line at Bryan at retailtech.com. If you'd like to learn more about what we do at Clientricity, visit www.clientricity.net. Until next time, stay well and go do something amazing for your customers.