Today we sat down with Emmet Kulka, Head of Customer Experience and Retention at The Naked Market, who drove the ecommerce launch of Rob’s Backstage Popcorn, the company’s latest brand on Replo.
The Naked Market was founded in 2019 by Harrison Fugman, Alex Kost, and Tim Marbach. The founders built the brand to experiment with new healthy food products across a diverse array of categories and bring them to market quickly, using data to experiment with distribution and marketing strategy.
The team at the Naked Market collects millions of data points across dozens of sources like Shopify, direct customer feedback, and search engine trends to uncover further opportunities for growth in new categories. Through focusing on direct customer feedback, The Naked Market has a sixth sense of which products to launch, where to launch them, and what the go-to-market strategy should be. They also constantly have their finger on the pulse of how their current portfolio of products are doing both in retail and online through D2C.
Launching Rob's Backstage Popcorn
The team’s latest brand, a joint venture with the Jonas Brothers, is a popcorn made from a secret recipe the brothers discovered from a family friend. In 2021, the brothers found a partner in The Naked Market, and within weeks the amazingly tasty popcorn launched Rob's Backstage Popcorn exclusively on eatrobs.com and shortly after in over 2800+ Walmart locations nationwide.
“Years ago, I started making this flavorful popcorn from my home kitchen. As time went on, I was getting more and more encouragement to share it beyond my circle of family and friends. And now, with great joy, I consider it an honor to share it with you.”
Rob @ Rob’s Backstage Popcorn
To meet their aggressive launch goals, Emmet scoured the Shopify App Store for ways to build landing pages and product pages on Shopify. Emmet and his team knew that a brand with the national reach of Rob’s Popcorn needed something that communicated the authentic story behind the product, the unique popcorn flavor, and Naked Market’s underlying ethos of innovative products. They needed something more flexible than Shopify’s built-in themes, and existing page builders were built for basic landing pages, not entire Shopify storefronts that met the high-quality bar of the Naked Market team.
Ultimately, after evaluating several options, Replo became their go-to solution, enabling the team to launch quickly while maintaining the same flexibility as when they had used custom developers. For The Naked Market, Replo provided the entire marketing and creative team the customization and extensibility that would traditionally come with a full-service agency.
"Love using this app for developing new pages on our website. Makes the design part very easy (figma-esque). They are also always adding new features + templates which is helpful."
Emmet Kulka @ The Naked Market
After coming to the decision to use Replo, The Naked Market was able to build out multiple pages and iterate on new pages quickly by copying, pasting, and tweaking the page designs. This enabled the team to launch new landing pages and campaigns, and because Replo was also built on top of Shopify, the pages automatically integrated with all the product and shipping data the team needed to sell online.
In 2022, Emmet and his team plan on launching even more amazing healthy products in retail and D2C, and because Replo supports multiple stores out of the box, the team will be able to use their existing layouts and designs for other stores, in order to get to market even faster and embody their "move fast, fail fast" ethos.