S1E10 – The Retail Avengers & Building a Culture of Innovation Welcome to Season 1, Episode 10 of The Retail Razor Show! In this episode, we turn the dial up to eleven on our ongoing innovation discussion! We previously focused on digital transformation & innovation both from a “what” and “who” perspective, but how do you create an environment and culture that fosters innovation without breaking the business? To answer that, we bring you a special guest, Andrew Laudato, Chief Operating Officer of The Vitamin Shoppe, fellow Advisory Council member of George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation, fellow RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer, and author of the new book, Fostering Innovation – How to Build an Amazing IT Team. Andy joins our Retail Avengers team to share his winning framework for building a strong foundation for innovation in IT teams, including his tried and tested approach to hiring, budgeting, and project management for innovation, plus more! Have you heard! Our podcast is staying strong on the Feedspot Top 60 Retail podcasts list! We’re currently at #22, so please give us a 5-star review in Apple Podcasts if you like the show! With your help, we’ll be on our way to a Top 20 spot! https://blog.feedspot.com/retail_podcasts/ Meet your hosts: I’m Ricardo Belmar, a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer for 2022 & 2021, RIS News Top Movers and Shakers in Retail for 2021, a Top 12 ecommerce influencer, advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation, and lead partner marketing advisor for retail & consumer goods at Microsoft. And I’m Casey Golden, CEO of Luxlock. Obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer. I've spent my career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business. Now I slay franken-stacks! Together, we’re your guides on the retail transformation journey. Whether you're thinking digital and online, mobile, or brick & mortar stores, we’ll help you cut through the clutter! The Retail Razor Show Follow us on Twitter: https://bit.ly/TwRRazor Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/LI-RRazor Join our club on Clubhouse: http://bit.ly/RRazorClub Listen to us on Callin: https://bit.ly/RRCallin Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/RRShowYouTube Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/RetailRazorShow Retail Razor Show Episode Page: https://bit.ly/RRShowPod Host → Ricardo Belmar, Follow on Twitter - https://bit.ly/twRBelmar Connect on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/LIRBelmar Read my comments on RetailWire - https://bit.ly/RWRBelmar Co-host → Casey Golden, Follow on Twitter - https://bit.ly/twCasey Connect on LinkedIn - https://bit.ly/LICasey Read my comments on RetailWire - https://bit.ly/RWCasey TRANSCRIPT S1E10 Building a Culture of Innovation [00:00:20] Intro[00:00:20] Ricardo Belmar: Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon. And good evening, whatever time of day you're listening. Welcome to the retail razor show. I'm your host, Ricardo Belmar a RETHINK Retail, top retail influencer and lead partner marketing advisor for retail and consumer goods at Microsoft. [00:00:33] Casey Golden: I'm your cohost Casey Golden CEO of Luxlock. Obsessed with the relationship between a brand and consumer, the experiences, everything. I've spent my career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business. Now I'm slaying Franken stacks to power the future of commerce. [00:00:48] Ricardo Belmar: So Casey, this episode is a real treat for listeners keeping with our recent themes on innovation and leadership. Our retail Avengers crew on clubhouse brought in none other than Andy Lodato currently the chief operating officer at The Vitamin Shoppe, a CNBC technology executive council member, a fellow advisory council member at George Mason University's Center for Retail Transformation, also a fellow RETHINK Retail top retail influencer, and most recently author of the book Fostering Innovation, How to Build an Amazing IT Team. Andy joined us for a deep dive on building the right environment for innovation. [00:01:24] Casey Golden: It's a great clubhouse discussion. Andy brings a fresh perspective and has valuable experiences to share about creating that ideal environment to foster innovation. [00:01:34] After our two part series on digital transformation and innovation, this one really dials it up. With best practices from a real world retail expert, making changes. [00:01:45] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Andy has lived through a lot when it comes to innovation, he's got so many examples and he's, he's worked hard to figure out what the right way is to create that ideal environment for innovation. And he shares with us what worked and what didn't throughout the discussion. [00:02:00] Casey Golden: Spoiler alert. You'd be surprised how concrete is a retail requirement. Stick around for his stories. [00:02:07] Ricardo Belmar: It's definitely one of Andy's best stories that he shares in this session. But let's not give away all the best parts, Casey. [00:02:13] Casey Golden: All right. All right. I'll let the dialogue unfold. [00:02:17] Ricardo Belmar: Yes. Quite clever. Nice and smoothly done. I bet you've been waiting to say that haven't you. [00:02:20] Casey Golden: I can neither confirm nor deny that. Totally never got to use that phrase before. I'm digging these one liners. [00:02:32] Ricardo Belmar: you're getting a lot of those in. [00:02:33] Casey Golden: So let's cut through the clutter and get to the clubhouse session. The retail avengers build a culture of innovation with special guest Andy Laudato. He'll be with us when we come back to ask him even more questions, so stick around!. [00:02:47] Clubhouse Session[00:02:47] Ricardo Belmar: Welcome everybody to the retail razor room. We've got a special treat this week. We're going to be talking about building a culture of innovation. We have a special guest that we'll introduce in just a moment, but in case anybody in our audience here is not one of our regular visitors. [00:03:07] We'll do some quick introductions of the Retail Avengers team that's always here in the room. Casey, why don't you kick us off? [00:03:14] Casey Golden: Hi, I'm Casey golden. I'm the founder of Luxlock retail tech platform. Focusing on customer experience. Been on the industry side of the fashion and enterprise tech. So kind of moved myself into the convergence of both. [00:03:28] Ricardo Belmar: All right, great. And Trevor, [00:03:30] Trevor Sumner: My name is Trevor Sumner. I'm the CEO at perch. We do interactive retail displays that use computer vision to detect which products people touch. So they wake up and immediately tell you about the right product at the right time. And so a exciting frontier of computer vision, IOT, and interactive retail display. [00:03:48] Ricardo Belmar: Thanks Trevor, Jeff. [00:03:49] Jeff Roster: Hi, Jeff Roster, a former Gartner [00:03:51] and IHL retail sector analysts. Now co-host of this week in innovation and on a couple of advisory boards [00:03:57] Ricardo Belmar: Great. Thank you. And Shish. [00:03:59] Shish Shridhar: Good afternoon, I'm Shish and the global lead for retail, with Microsoft. I've been in retail for about 20 years focused on AI and currently from an innovation perspective, driving co innovation with startups, for retailers looking forward to the conversation with Andy today. [00:04:16] Ricardo Belmar: Thanks Shish. And I'm Ricardo Belmar for those that don't know me, I'm the lead partner marketing advisor at Microsoft, and I've also been in the retail tech side of the industry for the last two decades trying to help retailers really get the best value from technology investments and super excited to have with us, our special guest today, Andy Laudato COO at The Vitamin Shoppe. And Andy, I'm gonna let you kick off about yourself and how you got to where you are today and what led you to write your book that was just published, Fostering I nnovation which is the topic of our room today. [00:04:48] Andy Laudato: Great. Well, thank you, Ricardo. And hello everybody. Great to be here. I've been a longtime listener and a contributor to the retail avengers. I am the chief operating officer at the vitamin shop. The vitamin shop is a, just over a billion dollar health and wellness retailer. We're mostly in the U S we have over 700 stores in the us. [00:05:06] And then of course we sell on vitamin shop.com. So in my role, as COO, I oversee the P and L for our e-commerce. I run the supply chain, technology, what we call enterprise portfolio management, which is something I think we'll hopefully talk more about today. As well as the quality and commercialization of our private brand or another way to describe it as I do everything at the vitamin shop that the CEO does not want to do. [00:05:27] Ricardo Belmar: love that description, [00:05:30] Andy Laudato: I'm assuming people are laughing at my jokes, but you know, I can't hear him, but I'll just assume that they're all laughing. Okay, [00:05:35] perfect. [00:05:40] So. I started my career way back in 1990 as a computer programmer at the limited fashion apparel, I was the first ever IT guy at a little startup called Bath and Body Works, and I really just fell in love with the business sides. I consider myself a business person who happens to love technology, not a technologist that works in business. [00:06:01] And I'm 20 years as a CIO. And during that experience, I made a lot of mistakes, especially early on, and some of them costly. And it really inspired me to write a book about some of the mistakes I made, what lessons I learned and the goal was to help young people or people in their early in their career. [00:06:18] Learning the easy way, right? Buy a book, read about it and do things better. I believe a rising tide raises all ships and especially in retail, we need to help each other out. So I'm hoping that
