Scentbird CTO on Personalization, Efficiency & The Future of Retail
We’re live from eTail West with Andrei Rebrov, CTO & Co-Founder of Scentbird, to explore the transformative power of AI in retail. From personalized fragrance recommendations to AI-driven automation, Andrei shares how technology is redefining customer experiences and workplace efficiency.
🔹 [0:14] Welcome to eTail West: Scentbird’s evolution from fragrance subscription to a global scent destination
🔹 [2:18] The challenge of discovering new scents online & how Scentbird solves it
🔹 [4:45] How AI enhances fragrance recommendations and personalization
🔹 [6:30] The power of AI in interpreting customer preferences & behavior
🔹 [7:39] Why AI-powered agents will redefine business efficiency in 2025
🔹 [9:55] The future of work: AI tools for retail, marketing, and finance teams
🔹 [11:30] Leadership insights: Aligning teams & avoiding the "complaint culture"
🔹 [13:08] AI's role in unleashing human creativity & innovation in the workplace
Join us for this fascinating discussion, and subscribe for more cutting-edge retail insights. And thanks to NetElixir for making all of our eTail West coverage possible!
#scentbird #etailwest #retail #ecommerce
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Transcript
Hello, this is Omnitalk Retail.
Speaker A:I'm Ann Mazinga and I am live again at the Etail West Conference here in Palm Springs.
Speaker A:Before we get started with our next interview, I want to give a quick thank you to the team at Net Elixir for helping us bring you all of the interviews and all the content here from the show.
Speaker A:You can stop by and visit them over the course of the next couple days at booth 501.
Speaker A:All right, with that, let's get to our next interview subject.
Speaker A:Here we have Andre Rabov, the CTO and co founder of.
Speaker A:Of scentbird.
Speaker A:Andre, welcome.
Speaker B:Thank you for having me.
Speaker A:How's the show going for you so far?
Speaker B:The show is amazing.
Speaker B:It's my second day here.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Actually, like second and a half because I flew in Sunday.
Speaker B:I had some.
Speaker B:Already had some good meetings in Sunday evening, and it's great.
Speaker B:Like, I love to accidentally bump into people who I don't know and exchange notes, and it's been great.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Awesome.
Speaker A:I'm so happy to hear it.
Speaker A:There's no better place than Palm Springs.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker B:And it's such a nice change from weather terms because I was coming from New York and 96 sun is good.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:I like this.
Speaker A:I like where we're going with this.
Speaker A:Well, let's start by just introducing scentbird to our audience in case they're not familiar, and then we'll dive into a little bit of your background, of course.
Speaker B:So scentbird is a perfume subscription company.
Speaker B:We now call ourselves a fragrance destination of the world because we started with fine fragrances.
Speaker B:Over time, we added candles, reed diffusers.
Speaker B:Then two and a half years ago, we acquired this amazing car freshener brand called Drift.
Speaker B:We are getting into the home scents because we launched wall plugs and more products to come.
Speaker B:And the idea is scent is good.
Speaker B:Fragrance is such an important part of our life.
Speaker B:Like, you always connect it to certain memories.
Speaker B:And that's why we always want to have.
Speaker B:We want people to have nice fragrances around them.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I'm a scentbird subscriber.
Speaker A:I do love just the variety that you get especially.
Speaker A:And we'll talk about this in a little bit, but I'm especially curious about how well it gets you to be able to experience different scents before making that big investment, which is really hard to do when you're ordering things online.
Speaker B:And that is actually why we started this, because when we started, most of the, like, 95% of online purchases were repurchases.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:You know, like, we met people who are buying the same Fragrance for the last 20 years.
Speaker B:Like the idea of signature scent.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:We all know this.
Speaker B:Like, you buy it, you go online, you find a better deal.
Speaker B:That's the only online purchase.
Speaker B:You want something new, you go to the store because you want to experience them.
Speaker B:You want to smell them.
Speaker B:Unfortunately, the store experience is not the best.
Speaker B:Like, we've all been to Macy's.
Speaker B:We all got spray.
Speaker A:Especially with all these teenage boys now.
Speaker A:They totally dominated the fragrance section.
Speaker B:That's a big thing right now.
Speaker B:Like, teenagers are into fragrances.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Which is good for us.
Speaker B:Anyway, the idea was how can we make it easier to discover new fragrances online?
Speaker B:Because it's not only how you discover it online, but also how you try to discreet.
Speaker B:Because if you open the bottle, you cannot return it.
Speaker B:So we started with fragrance recommendation.
Speaker B:And try before you buy model, full bottle sample.
Speaker B:You like it, you keep it.
Speaker B:Don't like it, you return it back.
Speaker B:But then it didn't work out.
Speaker B:And we started to talk more to our customers, and they said almost the same thing.
Speaker B:I have five, six, seven fragrance bottles at home, half full.
Speaker B:I want to try something new, but I cannot justify the purchase because I already invested so much.
Speaker B:And every year there are 10,000 more new fragrances.
Speaker B:So, like, you want to keep trying, and then we just come up with the idea of repackaging.
Speaker B:So now we are sending you, like 8ml of fragrance.
Speaker B:132 sprays to be exact.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker B:And it's enough for one month.
Speaker B:But what's more important is it's enough for you to understand do you like it or not?
Speaker B:Because it's chemistry.
Speaker B:You need to apply it on your skin.
Speaker B:You need to understand does it work for you or not?
Speaker B:Like, what kind of compliments you get from people.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And then you can make a decision to either buy a full bottle or what people do.
Speaker B:They keep trying something else.
Speaker A:Why was one thing that I think is really remarkable about how the scentbird, I guess, business model is first taking the quiz, like, understanding, like, fragrance preferences.
Speaker A:How are you tapping things like AI or other technology as you think about kind of the future evolution of that, especially as you're getting into new categories like home and vehicle fragrance.
Speaker B:Product discovery is the biggest problem, I would say, especially when there is variety.
Speaker B:Like, once you have three items, you're already like, which one do I need to buy?
Speaker B:Then you try and research it yourself.
Speaker B:And then you lost.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So this is where quizzes helps a lot.
Speaker B:But for me, AI is not like.
Speaker B:AI is the way how you communicate to people.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Because the recommendation agents are not new.
Speaker B:They've been around four years or 40 years or so, maybe even more.
Speaker B:But how do you explain why this specific fragrance is what we recommend?
Speaker B:Is it a note?
Speaker B:Is it the longevity?
Speaker B:Maybe you have some brand affinity.
Speaker B:Why it's important because people, you are using AI as quick way to do research for the customer.
Speaker B:And then people.
Speaker B:Oh yeah, that totally makes sense.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:I like woody notes because like we know we already collected data from you, but now we're explicitly telling you so.
Speaker B:And like, so AI does that.
Speaker B:But AI is also scalable.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker B:Because like it's amazing to have a person to talk to, but we can hire million people to talk in real time to our customers.
Speaker B:So that's, that's a great way to scale.
Speaker B:You still need to control it.
Speaker B:But another thing that a lot of people are missing, you still need to research what kind of questions people ask.
Speaker B:Because this is the way how you not only teach AI to ask better questions, but also how do you adjust your overall product based on what you learn from your customers.
Speaker A:So you're really using AI then in your business to help kind of take the vernacular that's different across all of your consumers for a woody note.
Speaker A:Or maybe I say I like being in the forest and then it's picking up cues and then you're learning from that.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:The AI Perfumista will be one of the biggest launch for this year that we are hoping we will deliver a lot because we have all these product feeds.
Speaker B:We have people who buy this fragrance also buy.
Speaker B:But we still don't answer with that.
Speaker B:The question why?
Speaker B:Why I'm seeing this or because sometimes people will think, okay, this is something they're trying to push to me, I don't want that.
Speaker B:I want to be unique.
Speaker B:I want to have a personalized experience.
Speaker B:And this is where AI closes the gap.
Speaker B:So we have high hopes for this launch.
Speaker A:Well, I wanted to transition quickly to talking about your session that you're going to be a part of.
Speaker A:Maybe one of the coolest titles of any of the sessions that I've heard of here at ETL.
Speaker A:C Suite Synergy.
Speaker A:We love alliteration here at OmniTalk.
Speaker A:So tell us a little bit about what you and your co panelists are going to be talking about.
Speaker B:We actually already spoke this morning and I would say the number one topic was around goal and answering the question why?
Speaker B:Why we are doing these things.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Because more and more companies adopt hybrid mode.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:A few still will remain 100% in the office.
Speaker B:But if you want to tap into this global talent pool, you have to go in some shape or form of remote or hybrid or something like this.
Speaker B:And it's.
Speaker B:You can control what people do.
Speaker B:What you can control is their understanding of the common goal, their understanding of boundaries that they cannot cross.
Speaker B:But then if you hire people who just self starters, they know where they're going to, they'll create amazing things.
Speaker B:So that was one of the biggest topic, another one around alignment was around like, and I like it from Mickey from Marigold.
Speaker B:Like don't create complaint departments because people often come to their managers and they complain, hey, marketing didn't deliver this, or copywriting is late again, and so on and so forth.
Speaker B:And if you support this even a little bit, that will create the problem because now people know they can express this more openly.
Speaker B:But if you say, hey guys, yes, they were late, but this is why it happened, or did you communicate it back?
Speaker B:Did you share this feedback for them?
Speaker B:Because maybe they will wait because for them it's not the highest priority.
Speaker B:But it is for you, right?
Speaker B:So creating this alignment between teams is important, but I share this personal experience.
Speaker B:For us a very pivotal moment was a couple of years ago when we, you know this book five Dysfunction of the team.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker B:And amazing book.
Speaker B:Everybody read it, but not necessarily took ideas from it and have an amazing concept of first team.
Speaker B:So your leadership team is your first team.
Speaker B:Not engineering, not marketing, not finance, the C suite.
Speaker B:And you should align with these people first.
Speaker B:You should be 100% transparent with them.
Speaker B:They should understand you.
Speaker B:Like even if you tell them just like a beginning of a word, like, okay, I know what I'm talking about.
Speaker B:They should understand your pains, your priorities, your goals, your bottlenecks.
Speaker B:Once that happens, the rest will fall.
Speaker A:Do you think that that's still a pretty significant issue with a lot of the retailers that are or that were in the audience?
Speaker A:Like, what was the response from the audience?
Speaker B:People like the idea.
Speaker B:I would say this is something that it's not like something that happens overnight.
Speaker B:Like yesterday we were online, today we all hate each other.
Speaker B:No, it happens over time, especially as the company grows.
Speaker B:Because as the company grows, we all have KPIs, we have our goals.
Speaker B:And it's so easy just to focus on my own KPI and ignore the rest.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker B:And again, it doesn't happen overnight.
Speaker B:It's just step by step by step as you grow.
Speaker B:Like Yesterday were like five people startup.
Speaker B:Five years later, 300 people, remote warehouses, omnichannel.
Speaker B:And it's Just easy to forget the stuff.
Speaker B:And that's why we do these off sites with the leadership a couple of times a year when we reconnect.
Speaker B:Okay, guys, let's focus on this month.
Speaker B:Let's leave our work outside.
Speaker B:Like, yes, it's important, but now what's important is this team.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting.
Speaker A:I mean, I think about back to my days at Target where it was the one on ones and it was exactly for what you talked about to complain about what was going on.
Speaker A:But I think that it's really important when you set the tone as leadership to say this is what our expectation is coming out of these meetings.
Speaker A:Have you considered the other like other things going on in the atmosphere at work or you know, have you thought about like what solutions it might be or causes and coming to it with that approach versus coming to it from a place of it's not me.
Speaker A:Yes, it's them.
Speaker A:Well, let's close out with, you know, Etail being here.
Speaker A:You are a very unique and specialized online business.
Speaker A:What kind of technology are you excited to learn about here or kind of content are you excited to learn about?
Speaker A:As you think about where you want.
Speaker B: To take Scentbird in: Speaker B:I'm super excited about AI and most importantly AI agents.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:This is something that I tapped into last August because we all use AI in some shape or form.
Speaker B:ChatGPT, perplexity, you name it.
Speaker B:But the biggest shift for me is AI agents because I first started to experience this as an engineer because now you can just talk to the system, you can describe in detail like this is the application I want to build.
Speaker B:You hit enter, you take your hands off the keyboard and it's there.
Speaker B:And it's pretty accurate.
Speaker B:Yes, it still does 80% of work for you, but the impact is amazing.
Speaker B:Now you can augment your senior like your team so much that you might actually cut your headcount request by half like this.
Speaker A:Interesting.
Speaker B:So what I and usually engineering teams, digital teams are the one who adopt these things easier.
Speaker B:So what I expect to see this year more like this kind of AI agent, tools and other departments, finance, marketing, operation.
Speaker B:Because I work with these people a lot and I appreciate the work, but they have to deal with so much mana work.
Speaker B:Excel crunching, Excel crunching systems like legacy systems.
Speaker B:So this is something that can make a significant impact on the team efficiencies and let people focus on like where they can actually deliver something unique based.
Speaker B:Because we hire smart people.
Speaker B:We hire them to do smart things, not necessarily typing formals in Excel sheet.
Speaker A:So you are really excited about, if I paraphrase this correctly, you're really excited about the opportunity to take the heavy lifting off of your teams right away to be able to start to use that agentic AI in order to kind of help them get to the next.
Speaker B:Best action, unleash their creativity by 200%.
Speaker A:Okay, so you're tapping into your human associates by really making sure that they are able to query in a different way or poke and prod based on like having that first amount of work in front of them taken care of and then they put their own spin on.
Speaker A:Okay, excellent.
Speaker A:Wow, this is so fascinating.
Speaker A:Well, Andre, thank you so much for making time.
Speaker A:Thank you so much.
Speaker A:People are going to be walking around on Etail, so make sure to look out for Andre and ask him about C Suite Synergy Agentic AI, the newest car fragrances that we talked about on our Fast five a couple weeks ago.
Speaker A:Big thank you again to Net Elixir for making all of our coverage here from ETEL possible.
Speaker A:And until next time, be careful out there.
