My name is Bryan Mahoney. I'm the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer here at arfa.
On Creating a Customer-Centric Experience
How do we think about keeping the customer engaged? This is paramount to what we're doing at arfa. So the way that we keep our customers engaged is that we have - we continue to facilitate those conversations. That we listen better than anyone else. And we ultimately respond with content. And that content can take a couple of different forms. That content can be words that are written in the form of articles that you're going to consume on one of our digital platforms, it can be a native application that we might create to help you understand your needs and your body better, it can be a brand - a brand that you like you feel like you're a stakeholder of and it can be a physical product.
Our ability to listen better than anyone else, to listen via a technology channel means that we need to be really smart about what we're building. It needs to be really buttoned up when it comes to data, so there will always be a human component to listening, and I very much think that our relationship with technology and the product that we're building at arfa should give the human beings that are facilitating those conversations superpowers when it comes to listening.
On Customer Engagement Metrics
So we're hyper-focused on CAC and think that there is a - there has been a playbook to some extent in D2C, which is you create a brand that looks nice, that has some great copy, and the product is probably pretty good, and then you go out and you acquire customers. And how much can you afford to spend to get a customer in the door? And we're trying to turn that playbook upside down, so we are we're going to be focused on CAC. We're going to be focused on organic customer growth, so if we're doing a really good job with grassroots outreach, meeting customers where they are, listening to them and facilitating conversations we should have more organic growth, more organic new customer acquisition than your typical D2C playbook would otherwise indicate that we would have.
So if I were to unpack that a little bit more, some metrics that I'm going to be really focused on would be CAC, number one. Like we can't lose sight of that, but also referrals. How many customers are you as a happy customer bringing into any one of our brands? Or, more importantly, into the arfa umbrella? Number of new conversations that you as a customer may have created, because I think through conversation - conversation is going to beget other conversation and that gives us even more information and intelligence that we need to build better longer lasting brands.
On LTV and Profitability
Customer lifetime value - like that is something I want to make no mistake about it like we're really focused on. But we are being really disciplined in our approach to profitability and I would encourage everyone who is operating in the eCommerce space right now to do the exact same thing and I think that means in a lot of cases leaving growth on the table, like we're optimizing for profitability for right size brands over all-out growth. You're fooling yourself if you think you're going to acquire - you're only acquiring that customer once.
