Growing and Innovating to Become Digital First

The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests

Curious how a mid-sized B2B wholesale business - established decades before the internet - embraced digitalization and added a B2C channel? Sushil Arora, CEO of Danica and Now Designs, shares Danica’s growth story of going Digital First, in both customer-facing and operations-facing ways, with curiosity, step-by-sometimes-uncertain-step, but always going forward.

2:59 - “Some of the most difficult decisions I had to make professionally… was at that time (March 2020, start of COVID)... 4:03 the positives that came out of that period, it opened our eyes to the things that perhaps were fundamentally broken in our business…to recognize that we weren’t recognizing the transformation that was taking place from a digital point of view.”

4:53 - “But as time went on, I recognized the efficiency of using technology to move information internally and externally.”

5:30 - “You realized that you had not kept up with the times by not being digital first… the Brian Beck book “Billion Dollar B2B Ecommerce” (see Third Growth Option Podcast Ep #88)... pushed you forward, out of your comfort zone.”

6:46 - “The book was talking to us as a company… my company strategy was as dramatic as some of those statements, to kick off as a company that if we don’t pivot… we’re gonna get left behind.”

10:23 - talking about PIM (Product Information Management system) “content has become such an imperative piece to being able to sell digitally… your sales tool becomes the content itself… the bell went off, it wasn’t so much about… we want to sell direct-to-consumer, it was more about our customers are selling to their consumers this way. And so how do we help and support that?”

12:30 - “The investment in learning…ties back to that curiosity… whether it’s direct-to-consumer, whether it’s a PIM or other software is to try and learn and be able to use that journey as development…you learn by doing.”

13:52 - “Opening yourself up with curiosity and experimentation to attack a Digital First mindset, that’s about… design thinking and asking the customer, what do they want? And then reverse engineer it.”

15:41 - “Every person in our company has two jobs, they have an operational job, and they have a strategic job… the strategic job is to understand why did the customer have to call, what is happening that is causing (this friction)?”

19:12 - “How have you helped people move from being… not curious… to becoming a little bit more curious?”

22:570 - adding B2C as a B2B company “has been incredibly painful…24:20 - the guiding light here, the beacon of hope is that what it’s done is show us where there’s gaps in our core business... 25:24 - two years in and you step back and say ‘are we doing the right thing here in terms of how much we’re committing?’ In the long term, it’s going to be imperative to who we are as a brand… the astute retailer is now expecting brands to sort of drive traffic.”

27:50 - “As you’re trying to be more effective and efficient on the direct-to-consumer side, you’re seeing opportunities to be more seamless, to be easier to do business with on the wholesale B2B side.”

30:15 - “As you were getting your arms around this Digital First mindset, you knocked a bunch of things out of the ballpark. Your company is larger today on the revenue side, the team is bigger, your revenue base is bigger.”

30:50 - “This engine has lots of moving parts, at the top of it is Customer Experience.”