Sonos and Ruggable are both moving past the traditional CDP, and JP Beeghly and Josh Maynard explain why. They break down how self-service capabilities freed up their marketing teams, how they evaluate agency partners, and how one rebuild went from a six-month timeline to three weeks once the underlying data was actually trustworthy.
Behind the Expert
JP Beeghly and Josh Maynard joined this conversation as the very first guests of the podcast — a "beta episode," as host Bryan Mahoney called it at the time. JP had spent five years as an employee at Sonos leading martech (after five years before that working with Sonos as an agency partner), following an earlier path through filmmaking and self-taught digital marketing. Josh joined Ruggable, the machine-washable rug brand, as its first marketing-side engineer and spent five years building out its marketing technology stack, after previously serving as Director of Engineering at Dermstore — roughly twelve years in engineering and e-commerce by the time of this recording. Both came to their brand-side roles from agency backgrounds, a shared history that shaped much of this first conversation.
The Quick Hits
- Agency work taught both guests the same lesson from the inside: brands operate under limited resources and limited mindshare, and an agency that doesn't approach that with empathy will struggle to be useful — a lesson both say they wish they'd had earlier in their careers.
- Neither runs a large internal team, and both explicitly push back on the assumption that an "iconic" brand must have a big headcount. Their model is doing a lot with a little and choosing agency partners strategically to augment specific gaps, not to replace in-house expertise.
- "Embedding" is close to a hiring requirement for agency partners at both companies — working side by side with the internal team on shared ceremonies and the same codebase, rather than executing isolated projects and reporting back.
- Sonos deliberately moved from one-way "blast" messaging — hypothesize about the customer, build a program, send it to everyone — toward what JP calls a behavioral marketing platform that responds to specific actions a customer actually takes, turning a monologue into a conversation.
- Ruggable frames acquisition and retention as one flywheel rather than two competing budget lines: what the team learns from acquisition sharpens how it talks to customers post-purchase, and what it learns post-purchase directly improves the product, which in turn improves acquisition.
- Both describe a first-party data philosophy built around giving customers control rather than maximizing what can be extracted from them — Ruggable frames it as declining to share customer data externally whenever possible; Sonos frames it as "data is human," insisting a metric as basic as "listener" has to be defined through real cross-team conversation, not just collected as a number.
- Their shared reason for evaluating a CDP wasn't a specific feature checklist — it was realizing existing point solutions left teams stuck submitting tickets and waiting weeks for data. The real requirement was self-service access for the people who needed it day to day.
From agency to brand — the empathy that survives the jump
Both guests started their careers on the agency side — Maynard co-founding a small agency that eventually signed Ruggable as a client, Beeghly running his own company with Sonos among his clients before joining in-house. Asked what agency work taught them about succeeding on the brand side, both landed on the same word.
Embedding, not outsourcing
Both guests described a specific bar for agency partners today: embedding directly into the team's day-to-day process rather than executing a project and reporting back.
Small teams, strategic partners
Pressed on how brands as recognizable as Sonos and Ruggable staff their technology functions, both guests rejected the assumption that a big brand needs a big internal team.
Technology should serve the goal, not define it
Asked how their brands avoid becoming a "sea of sameness" in a category where a competitor's tech stack is easy to copy, both guests described starting from a different place than the technology itself.
From one-way messaging to a behavioral marketing platform
Beeghly described a deliberate shift in how Sonos approaches customer messaging — away from a one-way broadcast model and toward responding to specific customer behavior in real time.
Maynard described a parallel shift at Ruggable, framing acquisition and retention as a single reinforcing loop rather than separate investments.
Data is human
Beeghly pushed back on data-driven as a slogan, describing the harder, more human work Sonos had to do to make the term mean something specific.
Maynard described a similar philosophy at Ruggable, framed around customer control rather than internal convenience.
Why a CDP wasn't the whole answer
Both guests described going to market for a customer data platform and discovering the category itself resisted a clean definition.
Six months down to three weeks
Beeghly pointed to a recent, concrete example of what the new infrastructure unlocked — both in speed and in how teams worked together to get there.
Sound Bites
- “It's funny you call us a big company — I wouldn't say we have a big team. Often I get on calls with peers and I hear how many people they have, and I just walk away jealous. But the reality is we try to do a lot with a little.”
- “You have to be agnostic to the idea of technology. Often the resistance you find isn't because of the technology, it's how you've implemented it. Technology should never be the answer — it should always be the solution to something.”
- “What we've strived to do since we partnered with Chord is really become more of a behavioral marketing platform. We're trying to create a conversation rather than a one-way message.”
- “We're all about trying to ensure our customers can live a stress-free life in their home. The more we understand the pain points customers have post-purchase, the better we can make our product. I think of it more as a flywheel than anything else.”
- “One of the terms I heard recently that I love is that data is human. We had to start having conversations that were more human — like, how do we define a listener at Sonos?”
- “The name of the game for us was all about self-service. That story about submitting a ticket and not getting a response for six weeks kills me as a technology professional.”
- “We had a fire drill we were trying to address — leadership asked for something very complex that, before Chord existed, would have taken us six months to execute. We pulled it off in three weeks. It's all firing together: the technology, the processes, the teams.”
The Chord take
Neither guest describes their brand's technology advantage as a matter of budget or headcount — both are explicit that they run lean teams and lean on embedded agency partners rather than trying to staff every capability internally. What actually separates Sonos and Ruggable, in their own telling, is a refusal to treat data collection as an end in itself. "Data is human" and the acquisition-retention "flywheel" are two versions of the same insight: a data point only matters once it's tied to a specific, definable human behavior, and a technology investment only pays off once it closes the loop between what a brand learns and how quickly it can act on it. That's also the real reason a CDP alone didn't satisfy either team. The problem they were solving wasn't a missing feature — it was an organizational one, where marketing and technology teams worked from different data, different timelines, and effectively different definitions of the customer. Self-service access, an embedded agency model, and a shared definition of a metric as basic as "listener" are all the same fix applied in different places: shrinking the distance between what an organization knows about a customer and how quickly every team touching that customer can act like it.
Put it to work
- 1Before hiring an agency, ask how much they're willing to embed with your team's day-to-day process, not just what deliverable they'll produce — treat this as close to a non-negotiable bar, the way both guests do.
- 2Resist the assumption that scaling requires a bigger internal team. Audit whether a strategic, embedded agency partnership could close a specific gap better than another full-time hire.
- 3Push back on anyone describing your organization as "data-driven" without being able to define what a core metric actually means in human terms. Align cross-functionally on that definition before building programs around it.
- 4Treat customer messaging as a two-way, behavior-triggered response system rather than a one-way blast built on a hypothesis and sent to everyone.
- 5When evaluating a CDP or similar infrastructure, prioritize self-service access for the teams who need the data day to day over checking off a vendor's feature list — a six-week ticket queue is the actual failure mode worth solving for.
- 6Frame acquisition and retention as one flywheel, not two competing budget lines — what you learn retaining customers should directly inform how you acquire the next ones, and vice versa.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
And is that mostly a reaction to the fact that it's harder today to acquire customers?
Josh Maynard
On the technology side, we are all about giving the customer as much control over their data as we can.
JP Beeghly
The benefit of technology is it's created a landscape where anything's possible.
Josh Maynard
We're all about trying to ensure that our customers can live a stress-free life in their home.
JP Beeghly
What we've strived to do since we've partnered with Chord is really become more of a behavioral marketing platform, so we're responding to the customer's needs. The best agency partners are those that really embed themselves and become — they just work side by side.
Josh Maynard
What's the customer need, and then how do we mold the technology around those needs?
JP Beeghly
How do we drive qualified traffic — people who actually want our product — to our site and our ecosystem. Data is human.
Bryan Mahoney
Thanks so much for joining me here this afternoon. We're down in LA filming what I hope is the beginning of a really exciting podcast that I'm trying to call Brilliant Commerce. The idea behind Brilliant Commerce is to get true thought leaders and real operators behind iconic brands around a table, so we can talk about the things that actually make these brands tick. It's not magic, it's hard work — at least that's been my experience. So I feel incredibly fortunate to be joined this afternoon by two people I respect a ton, that I've already learned a lot from, and who've been big supporters of what we're trying to do at Chord.
Bryan Mahoney
So today, in the left-hand chair, I've got JP Beeghly, and then Josh Maynard, joining me here from Sonos and Ruggable respectively. We're going to treat this as a beta episode for this conversation. I don't want this to be salesy — I'd really love for us to just have a natural conversation about the things you enjoy about your jobs, the things that drive you nuts, the things you've learned along the way. I'll introduce myself first, then invite you guys to do the same. My name is Bryan Mahoney. I'm the founder and CEO of Chord Commerce — Chord is an end-to-end commerce data platform for iconic brands, and I'd put Sonos and Ruggable in the category of iconic brands.
Bryan Mahoney
I'm Canadian, now living in sunny California — my Canadian accent will make a regular appearance on this podcast, should it turn out to be a regular thing. And just a little about me in commerce, why I think I've earned a little bit of the right to talk about this — my claim to fame is I wrote my first e-commerce application in 1997, which gives you a bit of an indication of how old I am. I've been hooked on commerce ever since, hooked on brands — which is one of the reasons I'm so excited to talk to you guys about your experience in brand and commerce.
Bryan Mahoney
So for the listener, anyone tuning into this beta podcast, what you can expect is to hear from people, get a peek behind the curtain, behind the scenes — as I said, it's not magic, it's hard work. I want this table to be a safe space, so I invite you to share the things you're comfortable talking about, and we'll go from there. Why don't I turn the mic over to you first, JP — introduce yourself, tell the audience about you, and then we'll do the same with Josh.
JP Beeghly
JP Beeghly. I work at Sonos — I'm called the senior manager of martech, which is probably equal to chief window washer. I've been working at Sonos for five years as an employee, and five years before that working with them as a company I owned. So I've been there for quite a while and have seen a lot of transition. I got into digital marketing sort of by accident, through a friend who asked me to develop a website back when it was page by page, and that evolved into a marketing firm — before that, I was a filmmaker. I think I've always loved being in a role that really focused on the customer experience.
JP Beeghly
One of the things we used to say as a filmmaker is that you don't know what you have in the can until you watch an audience see your film for the first time — and that's kind of how marketing works too, in my mind. That's why I really love marketing: you get to wake up and experiment with something new every day and see the response from your customers.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool. Whoa, tough act to follow, Josh. What you got?
Josh Maynard
My name is Josh Maynard, and I work at Ruggable. Ruggable is the first, original machine-washable rug. I've been there a little over five years — it's been a wonderful ride. I started as Ruggable's first engineer on the marketing side, built out the marketing technology stack, and have been very lucky to work with many more talented engineers over the years than I ever was. Great group of individuals on the technology team now, including data, software engineering, product management, IT, UX and UI. Before Ruggable, I was Director of Engineering at a company called Dermstore. So I've been in engineering and e-commerce for about 12 years.
Bryan Mahoney
You have some catching up to do. I did a little internet sleuthing in anticipation of this episode, and one thing I noticed we all have in common is an agency background — I did agency for nearly 20 years before making the jump to brand. So maybe just to get us started as an icebreaker — whoever wants to take this first — what did your agency experience teach you about how to be successful once you jumped into brand? And a follow-on to that: what have you learned since being in brand that would have you do something differently if you jumped back into agency?
JP Beeghly
You want to take that one first?
Josh Maynard
Yeah, I'll start.
JP Beeghly
There's a lot to unpack there.
Josh Maynard
Yeah, definitely. I loved my time in the agency world — I was lucky enough to start my own small agency with one of my best friends. We started really small, working with a number of nonprofits, and were able to work with Tyra Banks at some point, and had a great experience with Osea Malibu and Bliss Cosmetics. Then we signed Ruggable as a client, and that's how I started working with Ruggable. I was really inspired by all the brands I got to work with, and I think that taught me a ton about what it takes to be a great brand operator. If I ever found myself in the agency world again, I'd approach situations with a lot more empathy.
Josh Maynard
There's so many things brands are dealing with, and I think it's super important for any agency to understand the holistic view of the problems each brand is trying to solve — the fact that there's limited resources, limited mind share to tackle each problem — and to have a lot of empathy with how you approach those situations. I wish I had more of that when I was younger, working with brands directly.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, that's cool, great answer. So much in common. JP, how about you?
JP Beeghly
Yeah, I think it's a lot of the same story, honestly — this is my first job, if I'm being honest. I've always been an entrepreneur, always only had my own companies. Just like Josh, Sonos became a client of mine, and I really enjoyed working with them — in my own company I had a couple of brands I was very fortunate to work with, amazing brands, really customer-forward and brand-focused. When I started working with Sonos, I found I had an affinity for them because they were very customer-facing, brand-forward, and always thinking about the customer experience — that was really exciting.
JP Beeghly
What I'd say is aligned, and almost counter sometimes, is that working as an agency partner is a really interesting vantage point — you don't have a look into the inside as much as you want, but what a brand relies on you for is a totally different vision, one that isn't influenced by what's going on internally, and for helping break some status quo they may be encountering. That's one of the exciting things about being an agency — you come in as an authority and people listen, and you often have a little more influence on change externally than you find internally.
JP Beeghly
Once you start working internally, you find there are teams and processes you need to work through, and you really need to build a sense of empathy for that. To be honest, that was the challenge I found — coming in and understanding how to work in an organization. But I found it really works to your advantage. So what we try to do as a company now is strike that balance — internally, find the things that will instrument change, get the teams involved in that change, and try to release ourselves from day-to-day process when we want to do something new. That's actually fun.
JP Beeghly
I think that's what's been fun — living on both sides of that equation.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I love that answer. I remember one of the things I loved most about agency was the ability to see the same problem across multiple, slightly different brands — you develop that subject-matter expertise and can show up as that authority and work as a real partner. It definitely got me ready to make the jump from agency to brand. And we didn't rehearse this, but same story for me — what got me out of agency world to join a brand was going to work for one of our customers, which for me was a way to sort of date that company for a while.
Bryan Mahoney
We built the technology stack, did the design, and I was really curious about what happened next, and how you make that jump from agency to product. At Ruggable and Sonos, are you still — I know you've both hired teams and have internal resources — are you leveraging agencies today to execute against your product roadmaps?
Josh Maynard
We are, definitely. Yeah, absolutely.
JP Beeghly
Yeah, it's funny you call us a big company — I wouldn't say we have a big team. Often I get on calls with peers trying to get advice, and I hear how many people they have, and I just walk away super jealous. But the reality is we try to do a lot with a little.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
JP Beeghly
We tend to pick partners that have valuable resources — knowledgeable people on that team who can really augment the brilliant teams we already have inside the organization. That's really key to picking a good partner, in my opinion.
Bryan Mahoney
Awesome, same for you?
Josh Maynard
Yeah, I completely agree. Augmenting the team is exactly how we use agencies, kind of all around the world. We have our agency partners work on particular projects, and we have some near-shore talent actually embedded on the team, helping us work through larger initiatives where we want more hand-holding. We're pretty picky with who we work with, we have high standards, and we've been really lucky to work with a lot of amazing agency partners over the years.
JP Beeghly
Yeah, I love that you said the word 'embed,' because that's almost a standard and a requirement when I have decision-making power to hire a new agency — how much are they going to embed themselves into Sonos and work as part of the team? I think the best agency partners are those that really embed themselves and become — they just work side by side.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think that's a key learning for anyone listening. Two things I heard there — I'd look from the outside and think, Sonos and Ruggable, two companies crushing it, they must be huge, must have all the engineers in the world, must not work with agencies. And what I heard you both say, with your body language, was, yeah, we don't have enough resources, but we do a lot with little, and we bring on really strategic agency partners. I love that — one team, one dream.
Bryan Mahoney
The fact that you both have agency backgrounds — do you think that makes it easier for agencies to work with you, or a little harder?
JP Beeghly
I'd say easier. Going back to what Josh said — empathy. You have a lot of empathy when you've worked as an agency, and also some deep understanding of what you need out of an agency. Being able to see it from both sides of the fence, I think, is really valuable and beneficial to both sides.
Josh Maynard
I'd say maybe a little of both, actually. Certainly easier, because I understand what agencies are working through — that they have lots of clients and are trying to solve global issues, not just individual ones. But on the flip side, we have incredibly high standards, and we realize what it takes for an agency to be successful, and that there are other agencies out there offering the same thing. So a little of both — we want the agency to match our pace at Ruggable, and match the quality of code we're used to putting out.
JP Beeghly
Yeah, that's a really good point.
Bryan Mahoney
And I think that's probably helped by the fact that you both encourage them to be embedded, as opposed to, okay, go do this random project for us and come back with it. No — you're embedded in our process, on our ceremonies, contributing to the same codebase, effectively an extension of the team.
Josh Maynard
Yeah, definitely done both, and much more successful with the embedded model, for sure.
JP Beeghly
There's a learning curve — you can come in with all the experience in the world, but when you enter a company, Sonos, probably like Ruggable too, we're our own snowflake. We have very unique reasons why we do things the way we do. It's great to embed yourself, and I think that's one of the learning curves in any role — not to step in and change things immediately, but to understand why things are done today, and then effect change where it's necessary.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
JP Beeghly
Agencies that push too hard tend to end up failing when they try to control things too much.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think that's important too — it seems easy when you're just there for a minute, but there's real consideration to the pace at which we can affect change, and it's just different when the company's a bit bigger. One of the things I really liked about agency was seeing different sides of the same coin across a portfolio of brands — that gave me a ton of perspective, so when I'd show up at another brand, I'd have a lot of perspective to offer. I think that really grew me as a technology leader. I'm curious, now that you're within an iconic brand, how do you get that perspective? Is it from working with agencies?
Bryan Mahoney
Is it from your peers? I'd be curious how you stay on top of current trends, because you both seem to have a really forward-looking point of view on the future tech stack — where has that perspective come from?
Josh Maynard
Thank you, that's nice of you to say.
JP Beeghly
Do you know me well?
Josh Maynard
I won't sell myself short — I think from having conversations like these, first and foremost, but then certainly my peers. I'm lucky to work with a lot of people much smarter than I am, and I think that's the goal — hire people who can come in and own their domain, so when we hire someone at Ruggable, we're hiring them not for us to tell them what to do, but for them to tell us what to do. So really, surround yourself with great talent, make sure you're networking, and have an open mind to a different approach. If we didn't have that open mind, we'd still be doing the same exact thing we did five or six years ago.
Josh Maynard
We've been able to make many pivots over the years across the business, but certainly on the technology side — pivots that have been really successful for us and helped us scale the way we have.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool.
JP Beeghly
I could repeat everything he said, so I won't, because it's spot on. What I'd add is that networking is really important, and it can be a challenge when you're full-on in your day-to-day role — really opening time to network, go to industry events. One of the ways we like to work internally is leaning on our vendors to connect us with other clients, and we host things like lunch-and-learns — and we don't just do that with a close group, we try to include as many people in the organization as possible, because ideas can come from anywhere. Frankly, we hire the best, just like Ruggable does.
JP Beeghly
So we're probably going to steal some people from them too.
Bryan Mahoney
Well, he said it here, you're now on the record.
JP Beeghly
But the reality is you need to tap into those people, and the way to do that is include them in these moments for learning, because it really incites them to deliver good ideas. That's a challenge when your team has a lot of work on their plate — people get into a routine and just focus on what's in front of them. Taking moments for the entire team to step back and realize we're doing something greater and bigger, and that they have opportunities to contribute more than just their day-to-day operational duties, is really important.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool, I like that — I'm going to use it to segue to this inflection point. It feels like we're at a moment in the martech stack — you said you were hired as sort of the first marketing engineer, and you've both been in commerce for a long time. I think about the martech landscape ten years ago, everyone was doing the same thing — giving customer data away, it was really easy for a while to acquire customers.
Bryan Mahoney
And I look at some of the innovation on the Sonos and Ruggable websites, and you're clearly taking chances. We met because I think the two of you were both looking at a key portion of infrastructure differently, instead of going out and buying more point solutions — you both came to the table and said, no, I want to consolidate, I want to streamline these operations. No specific question here, but I'd love your point of view on how you've seen that landscape change over the last ten years, moving away from this sea of sameness.
Bryan Mahoney
For the longest time when I was at an agency, brands would call and say, I just want exactly what they have. And I'd say, well, what about your brand? And they'd say, no, just copy them — and I'd think, can we do better than that? I think you both work at brands that would be easy to copy. So how do you think about technology, either from a marketing point of view or an engineering and infrastructure point of view, as a way to move away from that sea of sameness? How do you find the confidence to take your infrastructure in a different direction, and what do you think you need to do over the next ten years to keep being recognized as thought leaders and iconic brands?
Bryan Mahoney
That's a big chunky thing we could take in a few different directions, but I thought about it a lot over lunch getting ready for this.
JP Beeghly
There's ways to look at it, but I think the important thing to always apply is what you're trying to achieve — what your goals are. You have to be agnostic to the idea of technology. The benefit of technology is it's created a landscape where anything's possible, so it's really about looking at your goals and pushing against everything you've already created. Often the resistance you find isn't because of the technology, it's how you've implemented it, or what you've put in the stack that's blocking the way to your end goal. So what we're constantly trying to achieve is, are we finding the right partner, the right technology for the moment?
JP Beeghly
Is that technology going to evolve, or should you build your stack to be nimble enough to evolve with different technologies? But technology should never — it should always be the solution. I think that's the important thing.
Bryan Mahoney
I like that.
Josh Maynard
Yeah, I might go in a slightly different direction. You mentioned a marketing or technology perspective when making some of these choices — at Ruggable, we try to take the customer's perspective on everything we do, and build technology around the pain points our customers are feeling. Whether that's our customers at home trying to decorate or redecorate their space — how can we provide content and tools for them to compare rugs, share a rug with their partner who's helping them make the decision — or on the flip side, our internal customers, our employees, who my team also serves.
Josh Maynard
We're constantly building applications to make their lives easier — automating a manual process someone does over and over, or building an application we use in our facilities to make sure rugs get out to customers as quickly as possible. Our whole team is thinking about what the customer need is, and then how we mold the technology around those needs. We're never really trying to build technology for technology's sake, which as an engineer you kind of want to do, because you want to build the coolest new thing.
Josh Maynard
We'd like to take a step back, understand the customer as best we can, and then find either a partner that will help, or build something custom. That's the overall philosophical approach we take to building, partnering, or buying new technology.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool, okay, I love the customer lens. How are you using customer data today to get to know the customer better, to deliver a better product — either a digital product or a physical one? I'd be curious to unpack that, and how it's changed over time.
Josh Maynard
Yeah, that's a great question. From a technology standpoint, we're really trying to take more control over our first-party data. In the past it was so easy to add a Facebook pixel, share customer data, and target customers fairly accurately through Instagram. Now we're taking a more holistic approach to customer data and using it for a number of things — not only showing you relevant content on the website, so if we know you're here for an area rug, we should be showing you area rugs, not runners. You're not in the market for a runner, you're here for an area rug.
Josh Maynard
On the flip side, we can use all the customer data we have to ensure we're making new products that match the profile of our current customers, so we keep delighting them with new offerings. We try to be as customer-centric as we can, and we're pretty choosy these days about how we share that customer data — we definitely don't share customer data whenever possible, and try to use it internally to make the experience for our customer the best that we can, on both sides of the coin.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, that's amazing to hear — an interesting position for a brand to take, because it should strengthen your relationship with the customer. What you're saying is, we appreciate the responsibility you've given us in trusting us with this data, we're going to use it to deliver a better product, and we're going to be choosy about where we ultimately share it. It's a nice position to be in. Sonos obviously has a ton of customer data — I'm sure you know what playlists I listen to, how many rooms I have in my house, as a big Sonos user. How does Sonos think about customer data to do the same thing?
JP Beeghly
I'll correct you a little there — we don't get that personal in how we view our customers. We look at big data — how you're using the overall product, not necessarily getting into whether you listen to Lady Gaga, which I know is your favorite.
Bryan Mahoney
Thank you.
JP Beeghly
But in my lane specifically, my department focuses on customer messaging — the emails, the in-app messages, the pushes, the texts. What you've traditionally done in that end of marketing is have a one-way conversation — you look at the data, hypothesize what the customer needs, build a program testing that idea, but send it to everybody. What we've strived to do since we partnered with Chord is really become more of a behavioral marketing platform, so we're responding to the customer's needs.
JP Beeghly
We're looking at and using all the new data we have — when we bring customers to the site and they interact with it, or interact with one of our messages in a specific way, we respond with very specific messaging they're essentially asking us for. I think that's important — we're trying to create a conversation rather than just a one-way message.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think conversation is super powerful, and data done correctly can be a superpower for an organization to have a conversation with customers, as opposed to just an investment in a Facebook pixel, which wasn't a conversation — it was, we're going to learn a little about you, give that data to an intermediary, and that intermediary is going to chase you around the internet with our ads and compel you into a purchase. That feels like a very different relationship with customers. I'd be curious — now that it's harder to do that, less effective—
Bryan Mahoney
—how do you resource against that within your team, in terms of balancing technology for acquisition versus retention, and facilitating conversation? How effective would that be — tough one?
Josh Maynard
Yeah, it's a tough question — I don't know how to answer it.
JP Beeghly
Yeah, I don't either, honestly — we don't have a full answer for it. Internally we're continually learning how to have that conversation, and how it differs in the acquisition model versus the retention model. Once you get a customer, retention and repurchase — we put a lot of attention there, because one, we make a great product, and we really want people to understand it the way we built it, as much as we do. That's really important for a customer becoming a loyal customer, which can then influence other purchases. But acquisition plays a part too.
JP Beeghly
You've got to leverage the conversations you're having with loyal customers and extend that into the acquisition model — that might be as simple as understanding what a loyal or MVP customer looks like in your data model, which continually evolves as you release new products. We're a little different from Ruggable — you could look at Ruggable and say they create one product, a rug, but they actually create a lot of products. People don't look at a rug and say that's a rug, they look at Ruggable and say, I want one with flowers, or checkers, whatever it might be. We're not quite the same product.
JP Beeghly
But we deliver that same kind of experience, something that creates emotion. So that's what we focus on — helping people understand that in both the acquisition and retention channels.
Josh Maynard
Yeah, similarly, we're all about trying to ensure our customers can live a stress-free life in their home — that's the type of product we're trying to sell, the type of product we want in our own homes. If you have kids or dogs, we don't want you worrying about spilling. We really want to create a stress-free environment. I think of acquisition and retention more as a flywheel than anything else. The more we learn on acquisition, the better we can talk to the customers we know about post-purchase. The more we understand the pain points our customers have post-purchase, the better we can make our product.
Josh Maynard
And the better we make our product, the better we can then acquire new customers. So I think of it as a flywheel where we're investing in all parts — at points we'll invest more technology into whatever part of the flywheel needs the most work, or where the landscape has changed. Right now we're really focused on the customer experience, both on-site and post-purchase — that's the main external customer focus from a technology standpoint.
Bryan Mahoney
And is that mostly a reaction to the fact that it's harder today to acquire customers?
Josh Maynard
No, I don't think it's a reaction to that. I think we've spent a lot of time and energy on that piece of the business, have a really great team in place, and believe fully we can make the customer experience on-site better than it is now. So it's more that we think there's still low-hanging fruit on the website, in terms of the segmented experience we can serve up to each customer.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I love the example you gave — if you learn a little about that customer, even anonymous, being able to change their experience with the brand in that moment to give them what they're looking for can help with acquisition too. There are terms thrown around a lot that don't always have the friendliest connotation — we talked about this a bit on the drive down — targeting feels like I'm a customer with a target on my back, retargeting, privacy, tracking. It's industry language — we've got to get better at tracking, better at targeting — but maybe we need to get better at conversation instead.
Bryan Mahoney
So I'd be curious — you've spent so much time in the martech space, where it's harder to target down to a pixel-perfect degree, and privacy is a big concern, rightfully so — as brands and as stewards of first-party data, has that shifted your focus or area of investment? On any of those terms — privacy, targeting, tracking — how are you thinking about it, and how are you guiding your teams? Because I imagine some teams are used to a certain approach: spend a certain amount of money, get a certain number of customers. So how do you have that conversation?
Bryan Mahoney
It's changing, and we don't exactly know the answer yet, but we're working to figure it out. That's what I'm curious to get to the bottom of, and I know we won't get there here, but the more conversation we have, the better off we'll be.
Josh Maynard
Yeah, I thought this was—
JP Beeghly
—going to be easier.
Josh Maynard
Yeah, sorry. I think on the technology side — and I'm not on the marketing side, not making decisions about where we're spending money or which audiences we're messaging — at the end of the day, on the technology side, we're all about giving the customer as much control over their data as we can. That's a continued effort — not something I'd say any brand is great at, and something we continually have to work toward. The name of the game is ensuring customers have control over their own destiny, so they can decide if we use their data or not.
Josh Maynard
That's the pursuit, and the perspective we're taking from a technology standpoint on privacy and customer data.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, okay.
JP Beeghly
I think it's a lot of the same — like we talked about on the drive, it's an evolution, and we've hit a wall with customers. When we talk about privacy, targeting, retargeting, all these programs feel like a pushy car salesman. I think ultimately what customers are trying to say is they want to be a bit more in the driver's seat. They'll typically walk away from the pushy salesman until they feel comfortable and want to make a deal to buy a car. It's the same for us today.
JP Beeghly
We need to figure out the balance — how do we drive qualified traffic, people who actually want our product, to our site and our ecosystem to begin with — and that really involves understanding our customer and creating a good experience for that qualified traffic, for the customers we already have. Creating things like loyalty programs that incentivize login, where customers willingly give you the data you want to use to better their experience, is what you need to drive toward. Ruggable's maybe got an advantage there, with a higher repurchase rate and incentive to repurchase — you want them to log in and see their history so you can show them designs.
JP Beeghly
It's a little different for us. A lot of people come to Sonos thinking they're going to buy a speaker, and it takes us a while to educate them that we're more than that — we're a system you can add a lot of components to, and really customize to create a very unique environment in your home. So we're looking at things like that, to really drive a customer experience that incentivizes them to log in, become part of the family, and have a more direct conversation.
Josh Maynard
I think I'm a three-time repeat Sonos customer — I'm in that category of repeat.
JP Beeghly
All right, I've got many Ruggables.
Josh Maynard
Good, good, I'd love to hear.
Bryan Mahoney
What was it that made you buy the second speaker?
Josh Maynard
The sound quality — I'm a technology guy, so I love the technology. My wife makes fun of me constantly about how much joy I take in connecting every speaker in the house and ensuring the quality from room to room is excellent. Sonos does it better than anyone I know of, at least. At the end of the day it's the customer experience, and the quality of the product — I've had my Sonos for years and they're still working well.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, okay, great brand, good product. JP, why did you buy more than one rug?
JP Beeghly
Same reason I bought more than one Sonos before I was a Sonos employee. I really like to create a nice environment, and I was telling Josh earlier that it was funny — when I used to buy rugs, I thought I had to go to the super expensive Persian rug store and buy the perfect rug that would last 30 years. I think Ruggable really tapped into and changed the thought around what a rug was — just hearing them talk about creating a stress-free environment, I would have never connected 'stress-free' with a rug in my life, but once they talked about spilling and things like that, it made sense.
JP Beeghly
Sonos is a lot the same way — before, to have that incredible sound experience, you had to build it into your walls, wire it in. Instead, Sonos came out with a great product — beautiful speakers you were proud to put out, flexible enough to build around. We continue to evolve our system to build for sound that carries you through your life — TV sound, room sound, outdoor sound, headphones now — and we'll just keep building what we call our own flywheel, bringing sound to you in every aspect of your life.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I love that. In a lot of ways the two brands are category-defining — before Ruggable, you'd have to spend all this money to get access to similar quality, but then it wasn't stress-free. Before Sonos, to have multi-room sound, you were hiring an incredibly expensive installer, everything was wired, and you were spending ten times what you were ultimately spending. I think that's the power of really great products and really great brands. I think about this a lot, because I feel like the pendulum is swinging back, to some degree, away from just performance marketing, which is very analytical, back to traditional marketing and brand building.
Bryan Mahoney
I saw a study recently from McKinsey that brands were investing something like 30% more this year than in the last decade in overall brand marketing — something like 'stress-free' or 'easy sound in every room.' That makes me feel good as a brand person. I like to tell the story — don't get me wrong, Amazon is a great brand — but I'll order something from Ruggable, or from Sonos, and I'll track that package. I'll know when it's showing up on my doorstep, and I'll show up from work and might have a whole pile of Amazon boxes there. Then I'll have that Sonos box, or that Ruggable box, and I'll literally kick the Amazon boxes out of the way.
Bryan Mahoney
I won't remember what's even in those boxes, but I'll tear open the Sonos thing and instantly connect it in a new room — now you know what room I've installed it in. Or I can't wait to move the furniture out of the way and install that rug. So there's this difference between a commoditized product — Amazon is obviously using their data in a certain way to make it easy for me to get what I want without thinking about it — and that experience of can't-wait-to-get-home-and-rip-open-the-box. It makes me curious how you're all using data to create those experiences. We're hearing some of those stories.
Bryan Mahoney
You're using that data, thinking about your customer, getting the right content in front of them, delivering the right content post-purchase — that's traditional brand building. Are there tools you've found in your stack, ever in your career or in the last year or two — and I don't mean this as a plug for Chord, this isn't a setup for that — where you didn't expect to use data in a certain way, and it made the brand stickier or delivered that customer experience, maybe even outside of Sonos or Ruggable? Have you been served data in a way, from a brand you love, where you thought, yeah, they know me, they get me, I'm going to tell my friend about this, or I'm excited for that next purchase, excited to kick that stack of Amazon boxes out of the way?
Bryan Mahoney
What's an aha moment you've had recently — long-winded question.
JP Beeghly
Yeah, it's hard to answer, because when you talk about the brand, that includes every aspect of the company. You brought up packaging, which is a really important aspect for us — we do a lot of testing with real people in our neighborhoods, to really experience the product. So I'd say we're doing that at all levels, and probably the furthest removed from the customer experience is what I do — we're delivering messaging to help them either understand the brand so we can drive them to conversion, or help them use the product better so they'll repurchase, or even if they don't, we just want them to be a happy customer.
JP Beeghly
On top of that, we survey every customer who chooses to respond — every customer at Sonos has the opportunity to respond to surveys, and the questions in those surveys are conceived from the data we've seen. So, speaking to Josh's flywheel concept, there are multiple flywheels going on inside a company to develop the brand.
Bryan Mahoney
Now that he's given you a couple minutes to think about your answer, you got one?
Josh Maynard
I'll talk about Ruggable. There were two big reasons I joined in the beginning — the first was that it was full of the most intelligent people I've ever worked with, and that's still true. The second was that, unlike a lot of other brands I've worked with or seen over the years, Ruggable was investing heavily back into the product — continually not resting on our laurels, making the product better and better. In the early days, we had an issue with the rugs curling, and that was something we remedied very quickly.
Josh Maynard
That was all based on customer data and surveys, really understanding how customers were using our rugs, where they were putting them in their homes, and what the pain points were. That early learning, directly from customers, let us reinvest into the product and make it a hundred times better than it was five years ago — if you bought a Ruggable five years ago, come back, because the quality has increased tenfold.
Josh Maynard
I'm so impressed by the teams I work with, because they hold that in such high regard — we're not going to just rest and keep selling the same product we've sold for five years, every single day we're going to do whatever it takes to make it better. That's all based on customer data and survey data. Outside of Ruggable, I see lots of brands do this — some of my favorite brands, like Nike, and I'm a big Adidas guy, I love Adidas running shoes, and I think Adidas does a really great job knowing when I'm in the market for a new shoe. They're almost always right, just based on my purchasing patterns.
Josh Maynard
So brands all over the place are doing a lot with the customer data they have, and we try to do our best at Ruggable.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool, okay — I'm going to use that to segue into talking more about customer data. About ten years ago we saw the emergence of a category of software called the customer data platform, or CDP. I met you both because you were in the market for a CDP, and at Chord, I think we've built what I've been going around calling more than a CDP. In the last ten years I've seen the CDP space evolve a ton, and you two just talked about surveys as being customer data too. One of the reasons I was excited for this conversation is that as I look across the CDP landscape, and we're selling this 'more than a CDP,'
Bryan Mahoney
we're often meeting marketers on one side of the table, and other times the technologists looking to buy a really important piece of software to evolve their approach to customer data and be nimbler. Ten years ago I saw so much conflict between tech and marketing — the way I used to tell the story, marketing would go to the data team and say, I need you to pull me a list, and the data team would say, cool, open a ticket, we'll get back to you in six weeks. Marketing would say, no, I need this now, and go buy another point solution — and the technology team would say, what on earth did you just buy?
Bryan Mahoney
Now I've got to maintain this other piece of garbage. What I'm so excited about in the redefining of the martech landscape is that you can buy key pieces of infrastructure that get both teams on the same page, on the same team, where your data is consolidated, you have that survey data in one place, you can respond to your customers' needs. So I created this whole outline for the conversation around, how do you shop for more than a CDP? When you were in market, Josh, or JP, how did you land on the recognition that your teams needed more than a CDP to future-proof your martech stack?
JP Beeghly
It was interesting — we very recently, as you know, went shopping for a CDP, and it's interesting, CDP was really hard to define.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
JP Beeghly
Any of the large CDP companies do a lot more than what a traditional CDP definition would be. That was our initial moment of realizing — what are we actually shopping for here? When we started looking at CDPs, and they started offering all these other things we weren't in the market for, we realized we needed them, but none of these other products really fulfilled everything we needed across each aspect of marketing technology. A lot of times you learn a lot through going through the RFP process, and learning about the technology that's available.
JP Beeghly
And honestly, the things you hadn't even thought about. So it was a bit of a learning curve for us — but once we went out, pulled back, and asked, what are we actually shopping for, then went back out to the RFP process better educated, better prepared for what we were looking for, that's how we ultimately arrived at a really good solution.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay, fair to say the CDP is a big part of the future success of leveraging customer data at Sonos.
JP Beeghly
Absolutely. One of the terms I heard recently that I love is that data is human. Data was so easily thrown around — we're a data-forward company, we're data-driven, everything was data. But if you asked someone what that meant, they couldn't really tell you — they'd just say, we have a bunch of data and should know everything about how people listen. But that's not human, everyone's different, and listening means different things to everybody. So we had to start having conversations that were more human — how do we define a listener at Sonos?
JP Beeghly
That was a big conversation that took really smart engineers on our side, and real thought leadership, to align org-wide on what a simple data point means. What the CDP brought to the equation, by the time it came on, was that we were all educated enough to have a real human conversation about data. So now we create events — we've determined certain events we think people take in our ecosystem that we want to measure, and we've developed those on the site so we can improve that experience and respond to those moments, which are human moments. It's not just about collecting data that's useless.
Josh Maynard
Yeah, I think that's well put. The name of the game for us was all about self-service. You mentioned that story about submitting a ticket and not getting a response for six weeks, and that kills me as a technology professional, certainly from my agency days, but more importantly from working on the brand side with Ruggable — we want to enable our teams to move as quickly as possible, which means they cannot wait at all for a ticket to be completed. We're certainly not perfect at this, we have a ways to go, but what we're working toward for all our internal customers is self-service.
Josh Maynard
Whether that's pulling a list of customer attributes within a few minutes of deciding you need it, or our site merchandising team changing the website in response to something in the press — ensuring they have the tools to do their jobs well. We're really trying to limit the friction. As we were thinking about CDP, the other piece of the puzzle was giving our customers more control over their data — a CDP does that nicely, or at least provides the technology to do that nicely. So those were top of mind as we looked at CDPs.
Josh Maynard
I think Chord fit in nicely, because it helped us enable reporting on all the great events we're collecting through the CDP, out of the box, in real time — that would have taken a good deal of engineering effort to provide ourselves, I think we'd still be working on it. Instead, partnering with Chord let us get that self-service right out of the box, which has been tremendously helpful. We still have a ways to go to use all that data to its fullest, but we've enabled the marketing team to move faster — at least that's the hope, because they can get the data quickly to do their jobs well.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, that's amazing.
JP Beeghly
That's well put, and it just made me think of my aha moment — recently we were able to implement something that just came up. We had a fire drill we were trying to address, and leadership asked for something very complex that, before Chord existed, would have taken us six months to execute. We pulled it off in three weeks — they still asked why it took so long, but I reminded them how many things were involved.
JP Beeghly
It wasn't just the technical solution — the collaboration that happened while implementing our new martech stack brought a lot of teams together, and we built a less siloed system, a lot more collaboration between different teams. It's all just firing together — the technology, the processes, the teams.
Bryan Mahoney
That makes me — I love hearing that. When you have a whole bunch of point solutions, everyone going and buying their own thing, it's almost by definition difficult to collaborate, because you're self-serving in a silo — I don't need to talk to you. But when you establish a place where people are self-serving from the same place, it makes that collaboration, that unlock, actually possible, and that feels really good.
Bryan Mahoney
I think that's going to be necessary as we enter this next wave of commerce, which feels more like traditional marketing — it's not just buying customers by sprinkling money on top of the Facebook tree and hoping they fall out the bottom. We have to use that customer data they're entrusting us with to do more — get more out of our tools, get everyone more on the same page. Coming back to why I was excited to talk to you two — I see you leaning in that direction, making these decisions and bringing your teams along, and it's not marketing versus tech, it's marketing and tech together.
Bryan Mahoney
I feel it when I shop on your sites, when I buy products from those brands, and I think that's super powerful. So you've run me out of questions — maybe one last one. As we look forward to Q4, the Fed just cut rates, consumer spending has rescued the economy for a while — I'd imagine both Ruggable and Sonos have high hopes for Q4 as leaders in the space, where there's going to be a lot of emphasis on data to do great things. How are your teams feeling about Q4? Are you generally excited — rolling out initiatives you hope the increase in traffic will give you more confidence and feedback to continue making the products better?
Bryan Mahoney
As we're about to round the corner into Q4, how are you guys feeling?
Josh Maynard
I feel excited.
JP Beeghly
I'm always excited too — I'll focus on the work, there are other people more responsible for the end results, and in my lane, I focus on our results. I'm really excited about what we've put together — we have a brand-new martech system, and this is really the first time we're bringing it out to the top-tier racetrack. I think it's going to be really great.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool, and you're excited?
Josh Maynard
I'm very excited. I think this is the Super Bowl of e-commerce, right in November, and it's also where my team specifically gets to showcase some of their best work. We have engineering pods working on infrastructure right now to ensure we can handle the increased load, and have great failovers if, God forbid, something goes wrong — that's really awesome behind-the-scenes work that throughout the year probably doesn't get the credit it deserves. I'm really excited for the engineering pods working on those projects. On the data side, doing something similar — ensuring our infrastructure can handle the hourly reporting we need to pivot and make good decisions during Black Friday. And on the marketing side, it's super exciting.
Josh Maynard
It's the opportunity to talk to the most potential customers we ever get throughout the year, and the opportunity for a lot of people to come to know Ruggable and hopefully buy from us. But really, at the end of the day, we're trying to provide products that reduce stress, and I think this is the best opportunity to do that — it's really exciting, the best time of year. And I'll plug my wife — my pregnant wife — this will be the first Black Friday I miss, because I'm expecting my first daughter. She's due in November, so this November is going to hit a little different for me.
Bryan Mahoney
I'm really excited about that too — exciting in so many different ways.
Josh Maynard
So many different ways. But yeah, very excited.
Bryan Mahoney
But it seems like the team's ready — someone else is ready to ride shotgun for that Black Friday excitement while you're becoming a dad.
JP Beeghly
Yeah, yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
Congrats.
Josh Maynard
Thank you.
JP Beeghly
Yeah, we all have daughters here.
Josh Maynard
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, good — I don't think that's a tough act to follow, let's leave it right there. Sounds good, guys, thanks for this, this was awesome.
Josh Maynard
Thank you.
Bryan Mahoney
Appreciate you joining me this afternoon.