Kristen: Hey, Harley. Welcome to Resilient Retail. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I am honored to have you kind of kicking off this entire Season One. The purpose of the show really is I mean, 2020 has been a heck of a year for everybody. I think brick and mortar retailers especially have been hit really hard, have been kind of tossed into what I've heard you say, like 2030 without any kind of preparation. And so this show is really meant to bring this value to them and to really help figure out what in the world to do right now. So I think you're the perfect person to kind of kick this off. I want to start today with a little bit of a personal anecdote. Being an Exec at Shopify, we're really well known for the eCommerce side of things. A lot of stores have closed in the last six months. On your personal kind of as a consumer, how you shop, do you tend to shop mostly online? Have you completely stopped shopping in retail since the pandemic, or are you still seeking out that retail experience as you as a consumer are kind of going through this 2020 whirlwind?

Harley: Yeah, first Kristen, thanks for having me on in Resilient Retail. I am proud and frankly, I'm honored to be the first guest. I hope I set the right tone for all your next amazing guests you have on. So it's a great pleasure to be here. Let me start by saying this. It is a misconception because of my role at Shopify and my sort of public social media activity that I'm totally an online digital consumer. And certainly I probably default to digital consumption or digital purchasing through eCommerce, because that's kind of... I'm a kid of the 80s and 90s, and so by the time I really became a consumer, by the time I was 18 years old or 20 years old, the Internet has started really to develop. And so I grew up with the idea that you can buy stuff on marketplace like eBay. I think the first thing I ever purchased was some sort of trading cards or something like that on eBay.

Kristen: Same

Harley: Or some sort of memorabilia.

Kristen: Mine was like an old...

Harley: And that's probably my first...

Kristen: digital camera on eBay.

Harley: Yeah I was trying to think what I bought. It may have been a pair of sneakers or may have been something, it may have been some sort of piece of memorabilia.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: That I wanted that I couldn't get anywhere else. So but that's actually not completely accurate. I love and some of my most favorite purchase experiences and retail experience have actually been offline. And I think what I look for as I think a modern consumer, that's what I call myself, a modern consumer, I suppose, is that I look for value. I don't mean value in terms of pricing value. I mean experience, value. So I wear a black t shirt every day. I have for the last 11 years of being at Shopify, and I buy most my black t shirts from James Perse. James Perse is a great designer. He's also a great brand. Why do I like James Perse? One, the t shirts fit me really, really well. They have a different sizing scheme than most companies. They go from 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I'm not really a perfect small. I'm not really perfect medium t shirt, but I am a perfect 1 in James Perse.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: So one is I like the fact that they actually have been very thoughtful about sizing. But two, what I like about walking to James Perse store in particular in a pre COVID world is that fundamentally, I'm walking in to have a great experience. They know who I am because I've been there before. They know what type of stuff I want. They're not going to show me a white dress shirt. They're not going to show me a pair of slacks

Kristen: {laughter} Yeah.

Harley: Because they know I don't wear that stuff. They're going to show me black t shirts.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: And not just that, but they're going to explain to me why this new range of black t shirt for this particular season are unique and different and that these are Japanese cotton as opposed to some other cotton. And that they have a certain GSM count. And I get the same thing at a place like Harry Rosen as well. Literally 10 minutes before we started talking, I got a text message from one of the sales reps at Harry Rosen, which is a Canadian luxury store. And he said, "Hey, I got some really cool sweatpants that I think you'll really like. Do you like them?" Sends me a picture. I said, "Yeah, I like them." And I'm either going to go pick them up this weekend or they're gonna drop it off at my house. So my view of retail is not necessarily divided between online and offline. My view of retail and my vision for the future of retail is just retail everywhere. And it's all about consumer choice. And I as a consumer get to decide how I want to make that purchase. You made the comment earlier about the year 2030. What I've been saying, and I think what a lot of us at Shopify been saying for a while now is that it feels like from a retail perspective, the year 2030 has been pulled into the year 2020. And to be very, very clear, what we mean by that is the following. When I started at Shopify 11 years ago, eCommerce as a percentage of

total retail was about five percent.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Something in that nature. Very, very small. And between like 2010 and, you know, January 2020, it grew from five percent of total retail to like 15 percent of total retail. So we got about 10 percent in increase shifting over to eCommerce from traditional retail. Well, now, as we sit here in sort of the back half of 2020, it's closer to 25 percent.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Now, there's some debate as a 25 percent or 30 percent or 28 percent or 22 percent. And that depends on if you count things like grocery and travel and all that stuff. But it's around the 25 percent mark, particularly in North America. So we have had the same acceleration in digital retail over the last three, four months as we did in the past decade.

Kristen: {laughter} Yeah.

Harley: Which is crazy.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: That is an insane amount of acceleration. And so what it's done is it's forced a lot of retailers to rethink their entire business model. So going back to the Harry Rosen example, which is a set of really nice men's stores across Canada. I may not walk into a Harry Rosen store for a long time. I may never walk back into Harry Rosen store for the next year or two, maybe a couple of years from now I will. But I still want to have a great relationship with them.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: And the way that I interact with that particular retailer is in a very personal way, over text message, over walking into the store and someone calling me by my first name and saying, "Hey, Harley, I have a bunch of stuff here that you may really like that has been curated for you," but it's all about value in that way. Now, I don't need that when I'm buying a new pair of Allbirds. I just bought what's called a Bearbrick. It's kind of this really cool kind of cause looking sculpture. I wanted to buy one for my home office here, and I bought one from Kith recently. Last week. I don't need to get a text message from Kith about that. I don't need to walk into a Kith store. I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted that little cool sculpture, the Bearbrick sculpture.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Which is beautifully done, made in Japan, and fairly well known in sort of the streetwear community. I was able to go on the Kith website, buy it, 30 seconds later, checked out using Shop Pay, and now it's being sent to me. So that experience contrasted with the Harry Rosen text message appearance I had this morning... Those are both great experiences. They happen to be doing it through different channels. But as a consumer, they felt the same because they both added great value to me.

Kristen: Yeah, and I love the conversation about value, because I feel like when we especially on the Shopify side, when we talk about value and when eCommerce stores talk about value, a lot of times it comes around to the idea of, you know, discounts and price and convenience and all this stuff. But what you're saying is really value is so much more than just that price or even necessarily what you walk away from with a product. There's so many other aspects that go into value. And in the retail side, a lot of that is that experience. It's when I walk to the cafe that's two blocks down the street with my dog and they see us coming, they know that I'm going to tie up Cooper outside and they're going to come and pet him.

Harley: And a dog bowl is coming, right?

Kristen: And a dog bowl is coming. And I'm going to walk in and they're going to say, "OK, right now it's hot. So you're going to want the iced Americano instead of the hot Americano. We've got you."

Harley: Exactly. It's what you always get.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: I remember as a kid watching movies or even television shows or maybe hearing people say this like someone walks into a diner and says to the person serving them, "I'll take my usual."

Kristen: Oh, yes.

Harley: And I always thought that one line, you know, "Do you want the usual?" "Yeah I'll take the usual." "No problem." That shows such incredible care, empathy... That is value. When I'm buying certain products, price matters to me because it's a commoditized product. I just need to get it fast and as affordably as possible. When I'm buying other stuff. I mean, black t shirt for me is basically my pinstripe suit. It's what I wear every day. It's my armor that I go into battle with every single day.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Price is less of an issue. Comfort, fit, longevity. Can I wear it for many years? Does it look better over time? Does it have a patina to it? Which these... What I love about James Perse is a lot of their shirts have patina, meaning it looks better over time. I don't want patina in a hat because I want the brim to look a certain way, and I want the crown to sit a certain way also.

Kristen: Yes.

Harley: A patinaed hat would look sloppy. So the idea of this value equation, what matters is does the brand, does the retailer understand what is the consumer seeking? What is the job that the consumer is seeking? Clayton Christensen has a book, and he talks about... It's called The Innovators Dilemma, and he talks about in the book the job that the product is supposed to be.

Kristen: Yes.

Harley: So there's a great story in there. And I'm going to get a wrong because it's been over ten years since I read this book. But he talks about people were going into I think it was McDonald's or Wendy's and they were buying these milkshakes, and they were buying milkshakes at I think it was like seven o'clock in the morning. And it didn't really make sense to McDonald's or Wendy's. Why were people buying milkshakes at seven o'clock in the morning?

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Well, it turned out that for the most part, the reason they were seeing a spike in milkshakes was it was mostly truckers that were buying them.

Kristen: Ah.

Harley: And it took you a long time to drink the milkshake. You don't you have to sort of gulp down a milkshake. It takes time.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: It has to melt a little bit. The milk shake in many ways was almost like accompanying the truck driver over their morning drive. It was almost like having something you can do for the next hour or two with you while you're driving the truck. And so the mistake there would have been for McDonald's or for Wendy's to say, "Oh, yeah, well, we're going to start offering everybody milkshake at seven o'clock in the morning," or "The world now loves milk shake at seven o'clock in the morning."

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: "Let's promote that." No, the job of the milkshake for that particular demographic was keep me company for an hour or half hour, however long that was. And I think that is really, really important. And I think the best retailers, the best brands, they have a deep understanding of what is the job, what is the role of their product to the end consumer?

Kristen: Yeah, this is something I've talked a lot about in eCommerce, which is this idea of I mean, there's this whole jobs to be done framework in email marketing and social media marketing. And that's a very like marketer technical thing that I think a lot of actual merchants are just kind of turned off by that. But really, it's this idea that when we're buying things as consumers, a lot of times we're buying some experience or some 1.5 version of Kristen or 1.5 version of my office. I'm buying something that's very emotional and that's actually going to take me somewhere different. And I think that's why we're seeing this cool ability of 2030 is here. And that's very stressful. But it also gives retailers a chance to actually start to think about things in this way instead of just someone is walking by my store and they happen to come in because maybe my sign looked cooler. I had one shirt in the window that looked really cool and that actually opens up the potential for retailers that maybe they didn't have before. Something I want to come back around to is this idea that you talked about even in the last couple of months, eCommerce has gone from 15 percent up to 25 percent or over. And so there becomes this question that I know a lot of industry experts are kind of throwing out, like could eCommerce actually replace the in-person retail experience completely?

Harley: Hmm.

Kristen: Is the apocalypse that we've been kind of talking about since... You see articles from like 2016 saying the retail apocalypse is here. Is it actually here now? Does this mean that eCommerce is going to completely upend the retail space? Do you see a future where retail is no longer a thing and everybody needs to be just online only, or is that a very aggressive stance to take on it?

Harley: I think it's the wrong question. I think the question should not be, is eCommerce going to be the future of retail? I think the question is what is the future of retail?

Kristen: Mm hmm.

Harley: And the future of retail fundamentally is retail everywhere and consumer choice will dictate that. You go back... I've told this anecdote a couple of times, but it bears repeating. Go back to when you were a kid, whatever that thing when you were eight years old that you really wanted was. I don't know what it was. For me it was a particular video game, and I was never a gamer. But when I was eight years old, every one of my friends was playing video games.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: And I wanted a particular video game. And so I don't remember what game it was. And it was probably... It was definitely the Nintendo console, but I don't know what game it was. It may have been Zelda or Link or Duck Hunt, something. I think Dunk Hunt came with the game. So it probably wasn't that one. But I wanted this game really, really badly. And I remember I think it was my birthday or something like that. I remember my dad and I, we were living in Montreal at the time. It was November, when my birthday is, and it's cold in Montreal in November.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: And I remember waiting outside the store, the electronics store. And there were a bunch of other kids and a bunch of other dads and moms there waiting with their kids, and we all stood there waiting for the doors to open.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: And when the doors opened, we all rushed in, grabbed the game, went to the cash register, bought it, and left. That is a perfect example of how and when the retailer was dictating to the consumer how to make a purchase. You have to line up. We're going to open at this time. You're going to pay this way. You're going to do all these things in order to purchase. And if you don't do these things, you are not going to get the game. So that is fundamentally how retail had been for a very, very long time. Retailers dictating to the consumer, here's how you want to purchase. Funny enough, not too many years before that, in Montreal and in Quebec, this may have been the case elsewhere, stores were actually closed on Sunday. Sunday was not a... Legally stores were not allowed to open on Sunday. There was actually a Canadian retailer named Cohosts, which I don't think exists anymore, who actually changed that. But stores were not allowed to open on Sunday. So you see all these different data points and these pieces of insight that suggest retailers used to dictate to consumers how to buy.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: That's over. Now, we, as consumers have are now telling the retailers, here's how I want to buy. I want to buy online, pickup in store or I want to buy in store, and have the product shipped to me, or I want to buy online exclusively. Or I want to go to a pop up. Or I want to go for a great experience with a very knowledgeable salesperson in the store. And I want to try things on. That I think is where it's going. And so I don't think eCommerce is going to be a 100 percent of retail or even 80 percent of retail.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: I think that some businesses fundamentally need to have a much smarter, much more sophisticated online presence with things like Shop Pay, with things like augmented reality, so you can try things on or you can place a piece of furniture around your home, the way Magnolia Shop does such a great job of. And other retailers and other brands need to have an amazing in-store experience where you have knowledgeable staff and you have great music and you have cool design and great art. What I don't think needs to be the case, I don't think it's a one size fits all. And so my hope is that through this pandemic, what will emerge is a rethinking by brands and by retailers and by entrepreneurs and businesses of, OK, what exactly are we selling and how are we selling it? And what is emerging, to go back to the idea of resiliency, is that you are seeing a certain group of retailers and brands and entrepreneurs rethink everything. They are taking in all this new information and insight. And they're making new decisions, and they're questioning old assumptions, and they're pivoting and adapting in this incredibly inspiring way. And unfortunately, you have another bucket, which I would call the Resistance Retailers who are waiting for the pandemic to end so they can go back to the status quo. And I think fundamentally that is not the right course of action, because whether or not this pandemic lasts for another two weeks or another two years, this is an opportunity for you to rethink the very nature of your business, the very nature of how you sell and how you interact with your consumers. And I think this is going to be a time where the businesses, but also the individuals that are resilient, are going to look back and say that was one of the most important times for our businesses future. And the resistant ones are just going to wave their hand and yell and lament, "I can't believe this is happening to me. What do I do?" And they're not doing anything about it.

Kristen: Yeah. And I find actually the shift as tough and as heartbreaking as the year has been for so many of us, there is you can always look for a silver lining, which kind of is the ultimate summary of what resilience means is no matter how terrible the situation, can you find a next step? Can you take in the new information and kind of shift your perspective, shift your mindset? And we've talked about this a lot in the DTC space, too. There used to be this like golden era of DTC where you could go pop like a $10 ad on Facebook and bring in $20 of profit from customers. And it was so simple to just kind of shove your products in front of customers and call it a day. I've always been on the team of like that was never the golden era. The golden era is when now consumers and individuals, we have the power to say we don't want to shop like that. We don't want to just have to play the games of the big companies out there.

Harley: Right.

Kristen: And I think there's this beautiful positive spin on it that now...

Harley: Well, actually, the golden era is if you are resilient, you are always in the golden era.

Kristen: Yes.

Harley: The golden era is perpetual if you are resilient.

Kristen: Yes.

Harley: Because what it means is no matter what is happening externally, you are able to adapt to it. Which is why if you look at the retailers and the businesses and the brands that are doing the best right now in the middle of a global pandemic, unlike anything we've ever seen, all of them either have an entrepreneur at the helm or have an entrepreneurial culture. And this goes beyond just selling physical products. One of my best friends is a guy named Steve Beckta, well-known Canadian restaurateur. He has three of the best restaurants in Ottawa. But really well known. The day that COVID hit, March 15th, and things got shut down, I happened to be with him. We were actually skiing together, and I was in the middle of trying to figure out what was happening, and he was trying to figure out what was happening. And he's in the restaurant business.

Kristen: Yeah, yeah.

Harley: And his restaurants were about to close. Now, he only has one product. It was delivering food to his customer.

Kristen: Yeah,

Harley: Inside a physical restaurant.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: And within a week of that happening, you had this thing called Curated by Beckta that that came to life, which was this incredible, amazing online wine service, this meal kit service. And it has exploded. His entire business has changed for the better because like any good coach or any good athlete, he's reading the scene. He's reading the room. He's reading the play. He's looking at the field and saying, OK, what is happening? How is this changing? And he immediately, instead of lamenting and saying this is going to be a really, I mean, it is a tough time for restaurants, but he immediately pivoted and adapted to it. And it's resulted in an incredible new business that he never would have even thought about had it not been for the pandemic. And that, to me, is resiliency. And that's what I'm so inspired by. And I'm watching it happen across every industry, from health care, to the food and beverage industry, to retail, to frankly, education. Some friends have kids that are just starting school and university right now.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: And what's interesting is they're saying, like some of their professors they're are nailing this virtual education stuff, these virtual lectures. And others are completely failing at it because they are not resilient. They are resistant.

Kristen: Yeah, I love the dichotomy between kind of resistance and resilience, which does feel kind of like this, you know, dark side and light side or black and white way to approach these problems is you can kind of toss your hands up and say, "This is going to be the worst year for my business, and no one's walking by my store, and tourism is down." Living in Colorado, that's a big piece of the conversation is, "No one's coming to go skiing. Nobody can go skiing. All the hotels are closed." There's all these tourism aspects of the state. And so you're seeing this difference between the brands who are kind of going like, "This is it. Like this is we're either going to close our doors or we're just going to fight this and we're going to be upset about it."

Harley: Or "Now we're going to be a hiking place."

Kristen: Yes.

Harley: Or "Now we're going to be a social distanced picnic place."

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Or "Now we're going to great ropes courses." And you see this across the board. And I think the only difference between those that are resistant and those that are resilient is that they actually use the change that is happening in almost like to catalyze some new direction. And I think that's what I mean when I say that the Resilient Retailers are inspiring. They're inspiring me, because whether it's a global pandemic or it's a global recession or it's a change in buyer behavior, resilient businesses, and frankly entrepreneurs in general, will always find a way to survive because that's what entrepreneurs do.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: We look to be resourceful. We know we don't have unlimited resources. We know we don't have an unlimited amount of assets, but we always try to make the best of the current situation. And when that situation changes, we change with it. Remember, Shopify started as a snowboard shop.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: We then became the best place to go and build an online store if you're a small business. We then expanded beyond online to offline and to social media and to social commerce and marketplace commerce. We then moved beyond small business to much bigger businesses as well. We then included things like payments and shipping. For me, the reason I love Shopify so much, the reason I'm so proud of our company and the people that work here, is because we embody that resiliency, and we do it because we're all entrepreneurs.

Kristen: Yeah, yeah, and that's why I love doing what I do and being able to have these conversations is because we're actually able to talk to merchants who are living out this resilience kind of motto. And I find it so cool that we dubbed this show Resilient Retail, and it can seem...

Harley: I love that, by the way. It's super cool.

Kristen: I love it. It can seem like this buzz word that we're kind of throwing out at Shopify. But having you on especially saying like this is something that we all live and breathe by. I mean, just looking at the product line of Shopify, we released an entire newly updated point of sale system in the heart of a pandemic.

Harley: In the middle of a global pandemic, where physical stores were closed. Exactly because we understood that this is an opportunity for us and physical stores are going to be rethinking their businesses. This is a good time for rethinking what software, what hardware, what check out systems they use. That's exactly right. But here's the neat part about everything we're talking about here. It all feeds back into one central premise, which is that if you can get good at being resilient, as Carol Dweck calls it, if you can have a growth mindset, you as a brand, as a business, as an individual, are able to deal with anything that comes your way because you know that you have the ability to adapt and that adaptability, that's what's really needed here.

Kristen: Yeah. And one thing I kind of want to touch on is this idea of there's this word that keeps getting tossed around, which is omni channel or multichannel, which is very like, you know, what does that even mean? What does it mean to be omni channel? And something I've heard you say a lot is a lot of the resistant retailers think of omni channel as a strategy, whereas the resilient retailers think about it as a tactic.

Harley: Correct. Yeah.

Kristen: Can you expand on what that idea means? And what does it mean for, Kim, who owns a clothing boutique in downtown San Antonio, and their foot traffic is down 90 percent than ever before? What does that difference mean between thinking of omni channel as a strategy versus a tactic? And how do single merchants actually start to embrace that idea and actually put it out into the world, so they can be this Resilient Retailer that we are talking up so much?

Harley: Yeah, well, let's use hypothetical Kim for a second, just because you introduced her. So hypothetical Kim has an online store, and at some point she reads a white paper or listens to some sort of keynote from some retail conference. And they all talk about omni channel and multichannel and all these sort of many channels model. And she goes back to her team or she goes back to her home office or her office, and she says, "I got to be omni channel. I'm going to open a brick and mortar store." And she opens a brick and mortar store. And no one comes. No one walks in. No one buys anything in the brick and mortar store. And now Kim is saying, "Oh, my God, I'm omni channel. I thought I was supposed to be omni channel. Well, that's because Kim made a very fundamental mistake. Hypothetical Kim. I'm not talking about any particular Kim. Hypothetical Kim made a really big mistake. The mistake was this. She thought that omni channel was a strategy. And where she got it wrong was, no, the strategy is sell wherever your customers may be hanging out. If some of your customers are hanging out on Instagram, you should sell there. If they are hanging out on the main street in your town. Yeah. You should have a brick and mortar store. But this idea that omni channel is a strategy is completely wrong. The strategy is sell anywhere where potential customers are. And the tactic to do that is omni Channel, is having a brick and mortar store potentially or a pop up potentially, or being at a farmers market potentially, or cross selling on Instagram or Facebook or Pinterest or Haus or Walmart.com. And that's the reason that Shopify supports all of these channels that I just mentioned is because we cannot dictate, nor do we know, what is the right place for every merchant to sell.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: So what we do is we make it really easy for any merchant on Shopify to sell on Walmart.com or on Instagram or on Pinterest. Because there is a good chance that

some of their customers are there. But the strategy is not to open up a brick and mortar store. The strategy is to get in front of consumers wherever they are. If you were to go back one hundred and fifty years or five hundred years, humans and people in cities and towns were hanging out in the town square. If you wanted to buy bread, you would go to the town square and buy bread from the baker. If you wanted a pair of shoes, you would go and buy shoes from the cobbler. And that's where people were. And that's where you should sell. But today, in 2020, consumers are everywhere, right? Social media is a town square for some. Marketplaces are town square for others. The Internet is generally a town square. There actually are physical town squares in certainly in Ottawa where I am.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: The ByWard market is kind of a town square. So I think that's where people get it wrong. The strategy is sell anywhere you potentially have customers. The tactic to get there is by opening up new channels, but just by virtue of opening up a new channel does not mean that channel is the right channel for you.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: I do not believe that... I'm trying to think of a good of a good example. So I love Muji pens, these writing pens. Muji is a company, a great brand. I actually discovered Muji pens by walking into a physical Muji store.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Why? Because I actually like trying the pen before I purchase it.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Now that I know which pen I like which is the selectable gel ink pen 0.38 mm, this is my favorite pen. I love this pen. And now that I've tried it in their brick and mortar store, I never ever have to walk into a brick and mortar store ever again by Muji because I can buy directly online. And so they probably need to have brick and mortar stores for people like me as a showroom, but my long term channel of preference is going to be their online store. And honestly they can make it easier for me by sending me an email every 30 days or every 60 days to say you're probably out of ink, given your typical consumption.

Kristen: {laughter} Yeah.

Harley: Here is a one click Shop Pay order. I've been trying to get Muji on Shopify for a long time now because I find their online experience could be better. So if you know someone at Muji, please let them know that I'd like to talk to them.

Kristen: Come on, Muji.

Harley: I will help them migrate myself.

Kristen: Come join us, please. {laughter} Yeah, and I love that. And something that I kind of want to pull out of what you just said for the audience because thinking about the owner of the liquor store that is a couple streets away from me, that their main audience was the college that's right in town. And for six months the college was totally virtual, and the college kids were here, and they weren't coming into the liquor store. It can feel when we're talking about omni channel, like, how do I know where my customers are? How could I possibly know this? And you can look at eCommerce stores and almost get the sense of jealousy of like, they have all these years of data on their customers. But I actually think that brick and mortar stores have this advantage that is a little bit sneaky where you've had these one on one conversations and experiences with consumers for so long that you have almost richer data than, say, just a DTC business does because you actually know the people.

Harley: Yes. Yeah.

Kristen: So you can back work that.

Harley: And when they're in your store, you have their undivided attention.

Kristen: Yes.

Harley: Which is not something you are going to get in an online context.

Kristen: Never.

Harley: So, yes, you have them fully focused and fully present in your store. So, for example, in anticipation to use this liquor store, in anticipation of schools closing because we all knew schools were closing months before they actually did, you could have talked to your best customers to say, "Hey, you're not coming back here. What are your favorite products here? What is the stuff you love to buy here? What would you love if I were able to get you anything in any type of wine or liquor, what would you love?" "Oh you really love Saké? Okay, great. I'm going to go and find an amazing distributor of Saké made in Colorado, or made in Ottawa," or wherever you are. And "While you're at home living in your parents for the summer, I'm going to send you some gift bags, some gift packages. I'm going to send you the stuff you love, so it feels like you still are getting everything you require."

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: That was the opportunity. That is a unique opportunity for brick and mortar merchant that an online merchant would have a more difficult time having a deep conversation about. I mean, you can send a survey out. You can ask a bunch of questions, but that merchant that has a physical liquor store could have said to that student, "You're a really good customer of mine. I don't want to lose you when you go back home. So what can I do that's going to be compelling enough that you're going to still buy from me even though you're not walking to my store?"

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: And I think that is the opportunity and that is what I'm seeing Resilient Retailers and resilient entrepreneurs do right now. And some of them are not just surviving. They are thriving.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: And that's inspiring to me.

Kristen: Yeah, and I love those stories so much, like the local spin studio that I go to is... They were able to open kind of right as things started opening, but they did all these things to actually change the experience. And you have to go in and wear a mask. But now when you walk in, they actually have your shoe size saved into their things. So you come in, and your shoes are already sitting next to your bike, and your bike was in like a taped in square. And there were all these things they did. They partnered with the letter press store that was right next door to make an entire line of t shirts to help the businesses next to them. And seeing those kind of things...

Harley: Amazing.

Kristen: It's so amazing and inspiring and I think it's the heart of the show is that retail is never going to die because those experiences are something that we as humans are always going to look for, as much as social media allows us to connect. There's still nothing quite like being in a physical space with another human being and having those conversations.

Harley: I agree. That's absolute right. Retail will never die because retail will always evolve.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: So the key is if retail is always going to evolve and retail is always going to change... I've talked about John Wanamaker. He created the first department store in

America. It was 1876. It was in Philadelphia. Randomly, it also was the first business that had telephone in it in America.

Kristen: Ah ha ha.

Harley: Well, at that point, it was incredibly innovative that someone like John Wanamaker and Wanamaker Department Stores was able to put a bunch of different brands and a bunch of different vertical products under one roof. And so after that, that was where retail was evolving to. It was the department store age. And those that adopted that and were resilient, they succeeded. Retail will never die because it's always going to change and evolve based on what consumers need, based on the circumstances in the world. The key, though, to be timeless and to be successful over the long run is to be resilient.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Is to keep evolving with retail. And you can try random, crazy things. Sometimes they work. They may not work as well all the time, but the best entrepreneurs just have that in their DNA, and they don't yell at the clouds and they don't lament the current situation.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: They find ways. And that's not to say... Let's be clear, it is a very tough time for a lot of people right now. Unemployment is at an all time high. People are sick. People are dying. This is a really tough time. This has been a very, very tough year for a lot of people. But through all of this, the silver lining for me is watching these great entrepreneurs and these Resilient Retailers change everything and make it better. And some of them have decide to start making masks and others have decided start making hand sanitizers. And so many great retailers and entrepreneurs are finding ways to fundraise for their community, their local community.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: So that is, you can help but be inspired by that. And I think that's wonderful.

Kristen: Yeah, and okay so I have to ask you this question because it is every day that I am getting a tweet or an email or somebody asking me, especially in the brick and mortar space, what the heck is this holiday season going to look like? Especially when you're talking about brick and mortar stores, who, for a lot of them for many years have depended upwards of 60 to 80 plus percent of their annual profits on this kind of either one weekend in Black Friday/Cyber Monday, or mostly for brick and mortar it's kind of Thanksgiving through Christmas. There's this whole season now that has been almost upended in the sense where whatever worked last year might not work this year. And this is the ideology of resilience right here. Do you have any kind of tips for the brick and mortar retailers who are trying to plan for what is arguably the most unplannable event of all time right now?

Harley: Yeah. I think that things like gift giving and buying something special for someone you deeply care about is timeless. That will always be needed. That will always be important. Some people can't afford to buy the same gifts they bought last year because they lost their jobs, and so that they may be looking for other things. My advice to any retailer who's preparing for Black Friday/Cyber Monday or preparing for the holiday season is to rethink the way that you've typically engaged with your consumer and your customer. I remember when I was a kid going to New York City with my parents and going to see some of the windows of some of the big department stores.

Kristen: Oh yeah.

Harley: Like Macy's or Neiman Marcus. They were magnificent.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Right. Well, that's not going to happen this year. People are not going to congregate around a window, but maybe there's a way to engage them. Like maybe there's a way to do a video which provides the same type of feeling and emotion. It won't be the same, but that's OK. It'll be different. It'll be unique its own way. Some physical retailers, honestly, they need to think about turning their stores into a fulfillment center.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: A very simple fulfillment center where someone can easily buy something online, and you use your brick and mortar store to do gift wrapping with your staff, and you send it out. Other stores are going to need to figure out a way to make it a lot easier. If you can't have people congregating in a physical location, and you're only allowed five people in at any given time, then maybe there's another way to do it. Maybe on your window, you have a bunch of different products and very simply taking out your iPhone or your smartphone and taking a photo of a QR code, you're immediately able to buy it and then it gets wrapped in the back and then someone brings it out to you. The cool part about the holiday season of 2020 is it's unprecedented, which can sound very scary, or it can sound full of opportunity.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: And I don't think there is any roadmap or any guests on this podcast, no matter how great the advice might be, is going to be a one size fits all. My advice is to be resilient, is to try a bunch of different things, to experiment with it, because you actually don't know. This may be the future of your business, and the only reason that you may be experimenting with it is because you have to do it now. And that's what I mean by this pandemic has catalyzed so much change and some of that could be really quite positive.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: I would also say this. On the gift giving side, it feels like... I'm an extrovert. I've been called a power extrovert. I love being around people.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: It's where I get my energy from. I can tell you that this is going to be a very important season for my wife and I in terms of gift giving. Even if it's something small or even it's just a letter, writing a handwritten letter to someone that I deeply care about, which means I need new stationery this year. Or maybe I know there's someone who has been admiring my black t shirts. I want to buy them black t shirts. I do think this idea of gift giving in 2020, particularly going into the holiday season, will be incredibly important. And I think retailers should really think about do I have enough selection here? Do I have the right SKUs? Do I have the right process and the right buying experience to make it easy for a consumer to buy gifts for people they care about regardless of price?

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: Because frankly, I think we all miss our friends. We miss our family. We miss her coworkers and our colleagues, and we miss the people that... We miss our postal workers.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: We miss the people that we used to engage with. The security guard at the bottom of our, at the lobby of our office. And I think a lot of us are looking forward to the season to find a way to reconnect with some of those people. And things like gift giving, no matter what the price is, I think it's going to be a big part of the season.

Kristen: I love that out of this whole conversation, I feel like there's one major theme that I can pull out for the audience, which really just boils down to commerce and tech and the pandemic and all of the stuff that's happening and changing right now, at the end of the day, we're all still human beings. And we all have human desires. And we want to do things with other humans, and we want to have these human experiences. And so even with everything changing and getting completely your strategies thrown out the window, being able to come back to that center of one, why am I as an entrepreneur doing this? What is my passion? And then who am I serving? And how can I make sure that the human beings on the other side of the dressing room door or the online checkout are having a great human experience? Which I think is the epitome of what Shopify is about. And the mission of Shopify in general is to empower humans on every side of the aisle to continue to build their communities and societies and their dreams the way they do. So to wrap, I want to get really human with you. We've talked about what resilience means for Shopify, what it means for merchants, what it means for the online entrepreneur. But, Harley, what does resilience mean to you in a very personal way? What does that word kind of bring up for you in your own personal life?

Harley: I have been able to... I fell in love with entrepreneurship a couple of times. I fell in love with entrepreneurship when I was a kid. I was 13 years old. You've heard the story, I think. I wanted to be a DJ. No one would hire me. So I started my own DJ company. Hired myself, which now sounds kind of funny, but at the time that was a really, really big deal for me.

Kristen: I bet.

Harley: That was a really big deal that I was able to do something that I wanted to do so badly with so much passion, with so much energy. And so that was when I first encountered entrepreneurship as a way to solve problems. The second and probably the more impactful experience with entrepreneurship was when I was 17. Mom and dad lost everything, and I have two much younger sisters. My youngest sister is 10 years younger than me. So I felt this deep responsibility to not only help out, help myself and support myself while I was going to school, at McGill at the time, but also help my family. And once again, I used entrepreneurship to solve the problem, which was I needed to be able to make a living, but still be in school concurrently. And entrepreneurship saved me once again. Throughout my entire life, this idea of entrepreneurship has been the tool that I've always activated and took out of my tool belt whenever I had a problem. And more and more what I'm realizing is that I could replace the term entrepreneurship with adaptability or resilience.

Kristen: Mm hmm.

Harley: And I think what is happening right now is it is creating an opportunity for those that are willing to not stand on their laurels, that are not willing to... For those people that are willing to get really, really comfortable with being uncomfortable this will be a time that we all look back on and say, "Wow, that was the change that I needed. That was the kick in the butt that I needed. That was the proverbial kick in the... Get me off the couch thing that I needed to change everything." And so to me, resiliency and entrepreneurship are deeply, deeply connected, and I think entrepreneurship is one of the greatest ways for human beings to solve problems, to find their life's work, to find their own identity, and I think in many ways this current pandemic is allowing and enabling more people to consider the idea of entrepreneurship. People that never thought about it before. Someone who makes beautiful blankets for their grandchildren. And that's all it was. A month ago decided to build an online store and sell those blankets.

Kristen: Yeah.

Harley: I mentioned on one of the earnings calls a couple of months ago, a grandmother in northern Italy was doing incredible in-person pasta making courses for tourists who now is taking the entire pasta making course online and selling it on Shopify. That is what I'm inspired by now, and so I am mindful, and I am wide eyed about the fact that this is a very tough time for a lot of people. But I'm equally inspired, and I'm equally reminded of what an incredible opportunity entrepreneurship is for people that are looking to solve problems. And right now, a lot of us need to solve a lot of problems. And so I love that there are new opportunities to talk about these things on a podcast like Resilient Retail. And we talk about adaptability and we talk about getting out of your comfort zone. But a lot of us didn't have to get out of our comfort zone in 2019.

Kristen: Mm hmm.

Harley: In 2020, we did.

Kristen: Yeah, well, thank you so much, Harley. This has been such an inspiring and heart moving conversation, I'm sure the audience is going to agree with me on that. Thank you for coming in and sharing your stories and your tips and advice for everybody. This has been such a great conversation, and I am so excited to see where this show goes and where we go with Shopify in the next six months, six years, six hundred years. It's going to be a great ride.

Harley: Me, too. Awesome, thanks so much, Kristen. I appreciate it, and congrats on this new podcast,

Kristen: Thank you.

Harley: I'm really excited about it.

Kristen: Awesome. Thank you.