Transcript
Speaker: Hi, Maria. How are you? i am good. How are you? I'm so excited to get to talk to you. Thank you for doing this. I think your work is so relevant to the folks who listen. So I'm so excited to get to have this convo with you. Thank you for having me. For folks who don't know you, can you say who you are and what you do?
Speaker: My name is Maria Costa. I am the Senior Director of Marketing at M&M Lissler. and M&M Le Fleur is a women's wear brand that has been around for a little over a decade, 13 years.
Speaker: We serve primarily a demographic of working professional women. We do have styles that many of our women wear their entire work week, but of course also on the weekends. Everything we do is rooted in the belief that the world is a better place when women succeed.
Speaker: So our clothes are just one way that vision really comes to life. We have whole digital content and community arm. We have stores across the country and text to styling service called Bento.
Speaker: Really everything that I do is across both the brand marketing side and actually the performance marketing side. It's a really nice marriage of the sort of two marketing worlds.
Speaker: And for me, that helps me really just think about our customer experience and the entire customer journey from the very first moment she meets us, whether that's in a store, through an ad, through out-of-home advertisement, like a billboard or activation that we've done, whether it's through our digital styling team.
Speaker: And I'm really responsible for thinking about how she encounters us, the message that she receives, and moving her through her journey to eventually, hopefully, her first purchase and a long relationship after that.
Speaker: Very cool. I'm a fan of the brand. So it's that over a decade ago, i think I was in probably a VP role and in agency and I like bought quite a few things. and what And there's something so cool about the brand over the last 10 years. What's the same and like what has changed for you guys?
Speaker: So I think the customer that we serve, the needs that she has fundamentally have not changed. We really like to think about our value proposition is taking the work out of getting dressed so that she can focus on what is important to her, whether that is specifically something on the professional side, whether she's focused on her family at the time, whether it's a hybrid of both. And I would say Most of our customers would say i'm focused on everything all at once. And so I need to not think about how I can show up in the morning and I need to stay polished throughout the day.
Speaker: What really has changed is that when M.M. LaFleur was founded, and so our founder, Sarah LaFleur, was former management consultant. She really looked around the landscape at the time. So in 2013, and identified a need for polished,
Speaker: functional, really beautifully made workwear that was also easy care. She was constantly on the road, and so she really needed something that she could throw in the wash, and that felt really good all day.
Speaker: And those women that we were serving really more likely looked like they were in a corporate role like yourself. Right. So it was like a very much, I'm showing up in the office five days a week. I need to have this very tightly edited capsule that goes back to everything else in my wardrobe.
Speaker: And I think to the way even our customer thought about ambition was very linear and Really how we have evolved has been in a direct relationship to how our customers have evolved and what's prioritized in their lives now. So most of them are working in a hybrid capacity. So they are showing up IRL in an office or an IRL workspace.
Speaker: They're also working from home. They're juggling and really prioritizing their families and their creative passions. They're a little bit more, i would say fashion forward, which has been really fun. So Adam Warfleur launched with seven dresses.
Speaker: When you think about it at the time, like the very easiest thing to put on for your corporate role was a great dress. And it still is, but it's been really fun to see her evolve, to understand how to wear wide leg pants, how to wear prints, how to become a little bit more knowledgeable on fabrics. And so and that evolution, it's happened right alongside her. And so we've evolved our digital content to really speak to what she's thinking about now in terms of ambition. It is not linear. it is not just a sort of I'm climbing the ladder and success is reaching the top. No, like we are really helping her to think about what success looks like holistically, what it feels like internally and what it can feel like showing up externally and what you're wearing. So I've been with MM for close to 10 years now.
Speaker: I got to see this evolution. and it was something we were already thinking about, but very accelerated by COVID, but have really gotten to see what it is like to not only build a brand, but actually to evolve it.
Speaker: What an incredible, cool experience. And when you talk about her and she, like, oh that yeah for you, like, method-outing your ICP, who is she? Tell me, what's your vision of her right now? So i'm glad you picked up on that because i think...
Speaker: What the animal third team does really well, it's the full team. It is not just the marketing team. It is everyone across the full team is when we talk about our customer, like we are truly articulating a fur. that We do have a brand persona that we like think about from a customer basis, but she manifests in a lot of ways. So we call her Samantha. Our customer base itself definitely, it spans a very wide range, but this customer, we have Samantha in our head. She's middle to senior in her career She lives somewhere like fairly cosmopolitan. She is balancing work and family life.
Speaker: She's serious about her work, but it is not her only passion. She would call herself well-dressed, but not necessarily fashion-forward. She like wants to look good, and she wants to know how to dress well, but she's actually looking for pieces more than anything that she can rely on.
Speaker: She is constantly dipping her toes into creative projects. We like to think about her as like the woman at the party who she's not necessarily like the life of the party, but she's the one that everyone actually like naturally gravitates toward because she is just really interesting. She has lived a very full life and that life is not just her work.
Speaker: I spend a lot of time with our customers, whether that's interviewing them for our digital magazine, whether that's on the ground at events. And they are all Samantha's. They are all women who are really good at what they do at work, but they're also so interested in the life that they are building around that work. For example, like we've hosted these VIP breakfasts and it happened to be that like three people in the room were also writing romance novels alongside their like VP level, like private equity jobs. They're very senior in healthcare. care
Speaker: It's things like that, where you're like, oh my goodness, like that's incredible. And I'm so inspired by them. And so that's our customer. That's Samantha. but Samantha is many people manifested in all of our women.
Speaker: Have the zamming. The Medbury ICP and Samantha is like... yeah i don't have a name for the Medbury ICP. and Maybe I need to think about her and name her. That's so interesting. and I have so many questions for you.
Speaker: But before I really... get into that, I want to pause and ask about the journey that led you up to this really cool role. So you've been doing this and immersed in this work for 10 years, but what was your pre-MMO floor work and or career journey like?
Speaker: I like to think about what I do now is actually like a marriage of the work I was doing prior to being 100% a marketing role and everything that I've actually learned during my time prior to this, I was actually at Blue Apron.
Speaker: And there was a brief stint at an audio fitness company. And at the time, this will make you laugh. They themselves are no longer around, but their entire value proposition was that no one would buy a Peloton because it was too expensive, which I find very funny. No one could predict COVID necessarily and the impact that would have on Peloton, but just very funny. And in those roles, actually, just to share, I was in executive assistant and chief of staff positions.
Speaker: And my time at Blue Apron was actually quite interesting because it was during what I almost think of as like peak direct to consumer era. The only thing that mattered was top line growth. And it was just like top line growth at the expense of like any cost. Right. And so all that really mattered was the numbers that you could show in your sort of subscriber count. And I think The world has shifted so much and it has shifted during my time at MM and has really informed me as a marketer.
Speaker: So I actually followed a former manager to This is this woman who I was like, I will follow you anywhere you go. And so there was actually an EA role open under her. And so I came on board.
Speaker: And I always like to say to people who were are pretty early in their career that it's actually okay to take roles that cast a pretty wide net. My goal was actually to learn as much as possible about the business. And so I moved from EA role into project manager role, really interfacing and working across all of our strategic projects.
Speaker: And so that helped me ultimately, i had something that I was working on with our product team, something that I was working on with our tech team, something that I was working on that pulled in creative and marketing at the time.
Speaker: And so I really got to learn the full business and then moved into chief and staff position at MM. And what you do with the chief staff is you throw them where there's no resourcing. And so the head of marketing left at that time during my tenure there pretty early on. And so I got allocated into the marketing and creative world, which I had spent a lot of time interfacing with working with marketing and creative touch, everything we do in the business. And so I had had to learn the ropes and it I realized
Speaker: In finding myself almost sort of 100% thinking about marketing day to day, that really ignited me. I think I had spent the first part of my career thinking that I was truly just an operations person. I was like, yes, I can get a project done. i have a project management certification. I'm the person you can rely on to just move things forward.
Speaker: And then suddenly found myself being like, oh, am. have this spark in my brain that I just can't shut off. It's so incredible to just feel myself, have ideas, and then take what I've learned around getting things done, to move them across the business, to communicate them, to understand what they goled up to from a business KPIs perspective.
Speaker: articulate that to executive teams and to business leaders, and then be able to get things done, actually achieve them. i think that's been really nice. So for me, I think that it's been a lot of learning. MML is definitely a place that values its team. i am not the only one who has been at the business for 10 years. it was actually a cohort of women who we started all as very junior and they're now the director of e-comm, the director of merchandising, the director of retail, the director of people operations. We have known each other for a decade now and come up through the business. And it's inspiring to me to understand what it looks like to actually invest in your team, give them the right training and understand that there is incredible growth and commitment that comes, I think, from fostering those relationships and those skills.
Speaker: First of all, I want to say a good chief of staff is a thing to behold and a wildly powerful person. I don't mean powerful in the traditional corporate sense, though they are, but the skillset required.
Speaker: I love a chief of staff always. And then it's so cool that it seems like marketing brought another part of your brain online you hadn't engaged with before it opened you up creatively.
Speaker: and then you became one of those incredibly powerful people who can ideate on something and then make it happen. And also too, like how beautiful that like you and these young women in this company that has an ethos and a mission statement around supporting women in that way. Like, it's really cool. I love what you just said about marketing and creativity.
Speaker: I do think work can ignite new parts of ourselves and be a very creative act to steal the Rick Rubin book title. there And I think that sometimes that's something think people maybe find complex to one, believe, and then two, to manage. Do you ever find it difficult when you're like, I'm really creatively engaged with this. I'm also mindful that I'm thinking about it before bed at night and in the shower. how do you manage the...
Speaker: unpredictable nature of work creativity in the brain? That's a really interesting question. And I think of myself as very lucky because what I get to think about on the creative side, like fuels and is fueled by what I am personally interested in I think for me, I enjoy the feeling of When you are beginning to scope out something new, and I think I'll take a collection launch, for example, like in the product marketing and how I think about the product marketing, but also how that might interface with even at a higher level and overall brand campaign that we're running. And so I actually enjoyed the feeling of getting a little bit overwhelmed by all of the possibilities first, because what always happens, and this is just the nature of being a marketer and being in a senior role as a marketer is that you are going to have to make trade-offs as you get like further down and like hone the idea. You are going to have to like,
Speaker: actually think about the KPIs that you're impacting, actually think about your budget, your resources. And so the idea it will get home, it'll get better, but it it might actually get smaller and that's okay. But I actually really liked the process of getting bigger and slightly overwhelmed and thinking about it all the time because it will taper off. I think it's important to feel a little bit obsessed and excited. That said, i think also the nature of working on a small team is that like, you are pretty much always on.
Speaker: And so it's important to put yourself, i have found in like almost a totally different environment. So I live in new York City, And then as a New York founded brand, the way that we think about our customer is that we don't necessarily think she lives in New York, but she's like pretty culturally connected. And so I, myself, I go to shows all the time. i am at museums. I am going to talks. I'm thinking about what she might be thinking about.
Speaker: But what my husband and I did last week was like, go to Colorado, do lots of hiking, try to get in a place where like none of that world necessarily overlapped. And so I think you have to sometimes physically remove yourself to take a break.
Speaker: Yes, like that. I truly feel like I could pick your brain about marketing for two hours. And obviously we don't have time to do that. But I have one more question about your history and then I want into the weeds of your day.
Speaker: So what was your major in college? And when you were younger, what did you envision yourself doing? I'll start with when I was younger. So up until about the time I was like 10 or 11, I was like convinced i was going to be a Broadway star.
Speaker: I went around and was like signing my notebooks at the name of a very specific character from the Broadway show Thoroughly Modern Millie. And I was an oldest child. i had a lot of main character energy and I was listening to soundtracks all the time. And I did theater in high school.
Speaker: And I never pursued that in college. I was an English major with an economics minor. I am so grateful for that English major. Actually, i had a conversation with my father at the tail end of my sophomore year. so around the time when you have to declare and he has an MBA and he worked in finance his whole life. And so i was like, oh i have an English major, I'm never going to get a job. And he was like,
Speaker: That is fundamentally not true. The world needs liberal arts majors. They like need people to be creative and have empathy and understand other humans. And you should commit to this. You will be fine. And it turns out, yes, I have been able to use that English major in many ways. And I think that right now it's actually funny because it's very full circle where I am the main approver on our copy. I am like thinking about crafting narrative all the time. And so it has come back full circle, but for a while, it was just an English major helps to inform the way that you communicate with others first and foremost, and how you think about things critically and approach problems that you maybe do or do not know the answer to. And that was very important. And the little coda I'll add is that one of my favorite marketing campaigns I ever got to work on at MM was in 2022.
Speaker: And it really felt like the world was like fully reopening again. And so we came up with a campaign called You've Arrived that took a lot of inspiration from the feeling of being that main character and being a part of your own show. And it was very buoyant and joyful. And we took...
Speaker: double-decker bus around Manhattan for several days that was outfitted to look like the inside of a New York City subway car that got crossed with a backstage dressing room. And it was filled with our clothes and she got to come try them on and take pictures and get goodies. And for me, it just sparked so much about what I loved as a kid. I just got to tap into that passion. And so I've actually really carried that energy with me in the years that have followed.
Speaker: Oh my God, it's amazing. Yeah. but Take me through your your day. This is a part the listeners always seem to love the most. So get into as much detail as you care to. When do you get up? What's your morning like? I know there's no average day, but what's the general gist of the stuff you're working through? And then how do you end your day?
Speaker: So I have been a morning person for as long as really i can remember. My brain is at its best in the early morning hours, but it is specifically at its best also like when I've gotten a workout in. So I usually get up around five, i have a cup of coffee and I sit with my tat and I take some time for myself and do some fun reading. that's usually 20, 30 minutes.
Speaker: Then I get my workout in and then I'm usually sitting at my computer by around 7.30. And the reason for that is that I'm really taking stock of the day. I'm like looking to see what performance is looking like week to date. First and foremost, what is the week looking like? What are the changes that we have to make to make sure that we are hitting our forecast? What's happening with our returning customers? is What's happening with new...
Speaker: Often the results of that is a couple of quick slacks with our, performance marketing agency, with our COO, who leads marketing and sales. And we either decide to take action or we decide not to take action. we decide to have a conversation or we table something.
Speaker: And then usually there are some additional messages that get spun up, our integrated marketing calendar that I own. gets moved around a little bit. And so I make sure everybody on the team who needs to know that knows it.
Speaker: And then we work from the office three days a week and we work from home Mondays and Fridays. But if it's a day I'm going in, then I'll usually get myself out the door. And my commute is about 40 minutes if the trains cooperate. And I spend that time listening to audio books. I love a good audio book. It is currently my absolute favorite way to read And I get to the office and then depending on the day, I'm in a lot of meetings. We're a small team. There's a lot of conversation happening at all times.
Speaker: I really do like the mix of being in person as well as working from home because usually we just get things done much faster in person. We're better for worse. And of course, we make physical product. It's important to be around the team, around our stylists, around the products that we're designing and have those conversations.
Speaker: And then usually wrap up in the office around 6.30 or so. And then depending on what I have planned. So I'll either need a friend for drinks or go see a show. Depends on the season.
Speaker: And then I come home and how I really wrap my day spending time with my husband. We love to cook. So if it's a later evening, like obviously we won't have a chance to cook together, but he's a former chef. And so...
Speaker: We love to come together. Usually we wrap it up with a show that we're watching together, have a conversation about what the next day thing looks like, sit with our cat, and then we go to bed. And no day is the same. So for example, next week, this schedule is going to look a little bit different, right? I'm still going to have that sort of morning moment where it's like, all right, what's going on with the day?
Speaker: What do we need to impact? are the levers we need to pull? But then I am going to be like fully offsite managing photo shoots. For our M dash magazine. It's actually really nice to not have each day be the same. And I think it's really important that I am spending time with our partners, with our customers, with our stylists in person and not just like.
Speaker: sitting in meetings plugged behind a computer. but You could get really immersed in the numbers without getting any of that in-person anecdotal feedback. And so always making sure we can react nimbly. We're set up well for the day and then ready for whatever the day is going to hit me with. All right. have questions. i was taking notes. and Sure. Yeah. You have a great question.
Speaker: What is your cat's name? Bat the cat. She's a black cat. and You can probably surmise. love it. And then for audiobooks, what are you listening to lately? I just finished Almost Reckless, the Amy Smilovic, who's the Tippi founder. Oh, yeah. It's really good.
Speaker: So i just read American Fantasy by Anna Straub, which was a lot of fun. American Fantasy... is also narrated by one of my favorite audiobook narrators. Her name is Marin Ireland. She's also an actress. And if you're New York based or planning to be in New York in the fall, she's going to be in a Broadway show this fall. So she's just an amazing narrator. This book was actually about a woman who goes on a cruise ship that is one of those themed cruises where she was a fan of a boy band in the 80s and early 90s. And this is all of these women and in midlife who are like on this cruise ship who were fans of this boy band. And it's really fun. And then in case anybody is looking for other audio books and you don't know where to start, i will also listen to Anything by Julia Whelan.
Speaker: She's the narrator. she has just got the most incredible narrative tone. For me, i have to actually do our voiceovers and our ads. So I jump in on everything. And so I have sometimes Julia Whalen in my head where I'm like her intonation on things.
Speaker: Oh my God. Okay. I love because the narrator's voice is everything. It's you everything. Yeah. If you're like, can I do this or can I not do this? But I've never really thought to look up the voiceover talent that I like. I just wrote these yeah down. It's cool that you're doing the voiceover very like young you Broadway main character energy. Yeah, 100%. I should also note that I was like a lector at my church growing up too. So it's like also very funny. Some of that comes back to around like, you have to make this the most interesting possible reading that anybody has ever read, even if they've heard it for decades.
Speaker: The same like with an ad that like some people don't also have their sound on at all times, but still. Yeah. but You have a great speaking voice. Thank you. I have a couple more questions. One, I'm really interested in that moment where you said you're all slacking and you're deciding, do you take action or do you not take action?
Speaker: And I feel like 10 years of experience in an industry, I presume that you at this point have almost preternatural instincts insofar as pull this lever, we wait.
Speaker: I guess one thing I'd be curious on, is there a particular area where you feel like you know how wildly honed spidey senses about? Mm-hmm. customer and how to navigate moving the dials up and down on a weekly or monthly basis. And so far as how you're talking to them.
Speaker: This is definitely something that I've gotten better at over time. What has helped me in first and foremost, just as being like immersed in the data. It is a gut level thing that when you're looking to move the right levers and you have a team with limited resources, you have to understand what's worked in the past.
Speaker: And also be like willing to test. So you get those learnings. So right now, for example, i really do have a sense of, and I'm so immersed in understanding what, for example, email really resonated with her in the last 30 days. And maybe right now, if the messages that we're sending her, she's not loving, whether that is because she's distracted because she's on vacation. Whether that is because we're actually seeing signals in our sales data that We're sending her a message about what she's wearing on vacation, but actually she's just buying suiting right now. She's actually thinking about interviews she has coming up back to her conference season. And we're hearing anecdotally also from our stylist team that she's booking appointments with that goal in mind. And so...
Speaker: I can make a recommendation to flip the switch pretty quickly and say, all right, this is an email that worked really well for us in the last 30 days or 60 days. Let's rerun it. Let's update the creative. Let's update a little bit of the messaging because maybe we ran it in the spring.
Speaker: And so we're heading into the fall at the time of recording this. But that has come because we are constantly looking day to day and week to week for both what's working right now, what has worked over time, what did we send last year?
Speaker: And i think that what has been really unique during my time in this world is that for better, for worse, a lot of the platforms that everyone is using and we're on Shopify, our source of truth is a dashboard called Polar.
Speaker: And so we're looking against Shopify and polar metrics, but all of these platforms actually have these really great AI agents that you can ask them, have these conversations with and say, I'm seeing a discrepancy here, or I can't quite figure out what's going on with email this week. It looks really up and down. We've sent some campaigns and then sent some smaller targeted sends. What is actually moving the needle for us right now? And being able to get that data faster is really opening up the ability to be nimble. And so...
Speaker: It's a gut thing, but it is also really a data informed thing because when you are going to make changes that impact your team, you have to be really clear about why you're doing that and what we expect to see because otherwise it just feels like spin. That's funny. I was actually wondering, as you were talking earlier, what dashboards you all were using. And something else you said is resonating with me. and I've been actually thinking about this a lot because at Medberry, we're doing a lot of LinkedIn strategy and content for our clients, most of whom are execs at enterprise brands, some of whom are founders, mostly female founders. Then we do also just some general ah leadership, comm, strategy, consulting.
Speaker: But we've also launched email marketing for ourselves and we're now playing with it for just a few of our clients who have really great relationships with. One thing when July and August,
Speaker: historically, it's a slow time on LinkedIn. Like people are on vacation and it's like, okay, how is that good or bad for us? We've been noticing email has actually been like incredible. So trying to calibrate and figuring out this audience, it's almost like the calendar year based off of their behaviors and persona. And I know it's always changing and evolving we won't ever get to the point where we're like, these three weeks in August, email is going to be the lever as opposed to, you know, September and February social. So It's so fascinating. And knowing to be able to say, hey, maybe let's not panic about this particular week because here's the drop-off we saw last year.
Speaker: and I'm not saying it's give yourself an excuse, but there is a certain level of seasonality that you always have to take into account because you're like, trying to make the right decisions for the moment. And then every year, I'm sure you have experienced this, right? Every year is a new set of trends. No year has been the same, particularly, i would say since 2020, it has really felt very hard to fully predict like where her brain is going to be.
Speaker: This year has felt probably the most normal-ish so far to predict, but there's always something. Thank you for sharing all that. And then, okay, final question. I am always so curious about when it comes to like fashion brands, when you all are in the office three days a week, what are you guys wearing?
Speaker: Oh my goodness. Definitely a lot of M&M LeFleur. But what I really like is i have seen over time that actually as we have pushed our customers and their fashion sense and their sense of style, our team has also become, i would say, much more stylish and fashion forward. We're really mixing and matching M&M LeFleur styles that we love with pieces.
Speaker: that are not in men, but might be lower price points. Certainly our creative director, she's our designer. So it's like she's pulling in pieces from brands that she loves that might be more on the luxury side. But I would say we're all really tapped into women's apparel generally and cool brands. And so it's actually really fun to work at a fashion brand because it's not even a question of like when someone comes in wearing a great outfit, you're like, where'd you get that? What is that piece? Where are those pants from? Tell me more.
Speaker: And I would say we dress for our days and we know our customers do as well. I think you are not going to show up every day in your sharpest blazer and your sharpest trouser and heels. There are some days where certainly...
Speaker: Our team will show up if they have certain external meetings or certainly our founder as well. But if you have a full day where you're just sitting at your desk or like you're in fittings, I think about our design team all the time, they're dressing for comfort. They're dressing for what the day is going to bring them. And what I like though about and MM is that I very rarely have to change before I leave for the evening. Whatever that evening is, whether it's an actual work event, whether it's something with friends, I am always dressed in the right thing. Amazing. Thank you so much. This was like a really fun conversation for me to get to have. I appreciate you doing it. Is there anything they didn't ask you about that you kind of would want to say? i don't think so. this was very fun to just be able to share. Really interesting work. And it's such a cool story too. It's unusual for someone.
Speaker: to be at a place for a decade plus and to be there with, as you said, like a cohort of other people who've come up with you. It sounds to me like a really special, cool environment. It's a special place. I came into this as a fan of the brand and I am now a super fan off the back of this. Thank you. For folks who might want to follow you, where can we send them? We'll put the links in the show notes. you can definitely follow me on LinkedIn. i am personally trying to get much better about posting there while also helping inform our brand LinkedIn strategy. So that would be the best place. All right, we'll put it in there. Thank you so much. And I'm so glad we did this.
Speaker: Thank you.
