Edgewell's Swan Sit at Camp Commerce Collaboration Key to Not Being Left Behind

Well, earlier this summer, Camp Commerce, an event hosted by serial entrepreneur Michael Loeb in Southampton, brought together more than 200 e-commerce executives to form meaningful connections. I was at the event and spoke with various leaders, including Swan Sit, a board member for NYSE listed Edgewell Personal Care. She took us through her story and how emerging technologies like AI are impacting the market. Take a listen.

It's affecting every public company, even startups. So, Edgewell has some beloved brands that are household names since we were children. Edge and Schick razors, Banana Boat, Hawaiian Tropic. Uh we also have some startup brands that we've acquired like Cremo, Jack Black, Billy, the female direct to consumer shaving company. What an incredible portfolio, some of which are more legacy. The AI generation looks at products differently. Not only is it obviously like buying online, but the way people search for products is contextual. You might used to search for a sunscreen. Now you're going into an LLM and saying, I'm going on vacation with my family of four. We're going into the wilderness. What products do I need? And that's everything from a battery pack that might be solar powered, which is not what you would need if you were going to a beach resort with plenty of outlets and electricity. Also, you might look at, hey, it's different environmental factors for the sunscreen. Do I need like city chemical blocking for pollution or do I need nature preserving that has a bug spray in it? Contextual search is changing how people discover products. and if you don't know how to find that context into the LLMs, you won't be recommended. and 70% of consumers are already using LLMs to do their shopping.

And what digital cycles have you seen in the span of your career, especially in E-com?

2000, it was the dot com boom and I remember I worked at a cyber cafe when I was in college and I saw very basic web search and I was like, whoa, this is going to change everything. The way I had a little bit of email in college, I was like, I never need to send a letter again. So first it was e-commerce and just getting on the internet having information and retail shelves at your fingertips. Then it was social media. We didn't care what influencers ate for breakfast, but obviously, the way we do storytelling content or even do use influencers as validation of what the brands are saying firsthand, hugely important. Then it was blockchain for a minute and a lot of those NFTs fell away, but blockchain technology for consumer information like identifying customers through different channels, sometimes even digital products for loyalty are hugely important. AI is the next big game changer, just like the invention of the internet and e-commerce. I think it's overstated in the short-term value and understated in the long-term one, right? It's going to fundamentally change not how not only how consumers shop and find brands, but think about when you wake up and you're not pulling dashboards and you're not making slides, you literally have your AI assistant, give you the numbers for the business over the past 12 hours when you were sleeping. You know the three things you need to change to optimize the business and it frees up your mind for the next creative campaign for how to optimize your mix of product for your promotion schedule that day. It's going to supercharge everything at our fingertips. And I don't think that's a bad thing. Of course, we're going to have to upskill and reskill, but think about when you had to do math with an abacus and then you got Excel, like life changed.

And how can customers and consumers embrace this new technology rather than fear it?

It's learning about it. The internet is a free education tool. Back in when I was a teenager, if you want to start a business, you had a lemonade stand or a paper route, right? Or you go into a bank for a business loan, you're not getting that when you're 14 years old. But fingertip information from the internet and the ability to learn, especially from a lot of creators who want to share that knowledge. I spend most of my time explaining how things work to people. That's free education. So if you're hungry, you vet the source, you double check what you're hearing because there's a lot of slop out there, you can learn for free in a way that premium private school educations or even private universities used to do. If you're hungry and you're diligent and you're willing to look for the information. That's why we have startups of teenagers that are doing amazing business as good as some of the brands that I work with, right? Are you hungry? Are you interested to learn and are you willing to do the work?

And what is the value of e-commerce leaders gathering together today in Southampton at Michael Lobe's house for this beautiful event.

I'm a huge fan of Michael's. He's been incubating some of the best startups for decades, but also gathering community around it. And the interesting thing about people in Michael's community and how we also have self-selected to be here is you could be competitive and say I don't want to share. But events like this, people actually open kimono. They learn from each other. They share because people, for example in beauty buy seven to 12 different beauty brands. So you may not be competitive, you might be complimentary. So when people come and break down those silos of, well, you're my competitor or, you know, people buy so many different brands. So when you come together and share ideas, it's kind of like having a telescope pointed at a night sky. You see a little patch and you think you know what the universe looks like. But what if you had 10 more of those patches? Now you're starting to figure it out. And I think this is a revolution where everyone wins if we are smarter in how we inform AI and put guard rails around how we use AI. I think the competitive advantage of being early is vastly going away. Everyone has access to these open LLMs, even a paid subscription's not unaffordable and the models coming from overseas, faster, more efficient, maybe better. This is just table stakes now. So if you're not sharing with each other and finding partnerships and collaborating, I think you're going to be left behind because back then you could have the endcap in the retail store and win. Nowadays, everyone is pulling in the same direction, everyone has the same access to the same tools. So if you're not collaborating, it's going to be a be a tough game going forward, even the big Fortune 100s.