Lori Coulter built Summersalt’s product engine on data from 10,000 body scans and direct feedback on every fit. That foundation, combined with a disciplined test-and-scale approach, is what keeps customers coming back season after season. Lori and Bryan go deep on the full arc from founding to fit to AI adoption. They cover why she and her co-founder have stayed aligned for nine years, how they read product signals on launch day, and why most brands haven’t actually transformed with AI yet.
Behind the Expert
Lori Coulter co-founded Summersalt in 2017 and runs it as CEO. Long before that, she built a business with a major department store around digital body scanning and made-to-order swimwear — scanning 10,000 women, building a suit for each, and turning their fit feedback into a pattern library of more than a million combinations. That IP became the product engine behind Summersalt. She runs the company from St. Louis rather than the coasts, leads product and merchandising, still sits in on every fitting, and has partnered with co-founder Reshma for nine years.
The Quick Hits
- Fit is the moat, and fit is a data asset. 10,000 body scans plus feedback on every return compound into lower return rates and a product engine competitors can't easily copy.
- Swimwear is the "most vulnerable garment," so empathy is the strategy. Earn trust on the hardest purchase and you get "entry into her suitcase" — permission to sell everything else.
- Discipline beats volume. Full-price timing, testing new silhouettes in core solids, and the willingness to kill a "D" product on day one keep the economics healthy.
- A co-founder partnership lasts on shared values, not overlapping skills — nine years in and still aligned.
- "Doing AI" isn't the same as leveraging it. The teams pulling ahead point AI at a documented foundation; output you can't govern or repeat isn't a productivity gain.
A fit advantage built from 10,000 body scans
Before Summersalt, Coulter ran a body-scanning, made-to-order swimwear business with a major department store. She scanned 10,000 women, made a suit for each, and collected precise feedback on what fit and what didn't — feeding a pattern library of over a million combinations. That became the product-development engine Summersalt launched on in 2017.
This is a data moat, not a marketing line. Summersalt gathers data on every return, calibrates it by style and size — too long, too short, too much coverage — and feeds it back into the product, driving return rates down over time. It's the kind of proprietary advantage that's hard to buy and harder to copy.
Empathy as the strategy
Coulter's framing is that the swimsuit is the most vulnerable thing a customer will wear in public, so the brand leads with empathy — aspirational but accessible, "your cooler best friend down the street." The payoff is loyalty: she cites data that swimwear brands which earn a following hold roughly 80% of that customer's future swimwear spend. Summersalt treats the first suit as "entry into her suitcase," then earns the permission to fill the rest of it.
Discipline over volume
Swimwear is bought against a deadline — a trip — which means customers buy at full price rather than waiting for a discount. Summersalt protects that dynamic with discipline: it tests new silhouettes in core solids (to read the shape, not the print), reads a launch's A/B/C/D grade almost immediately, and is willing to walk away from a loser instead of defending it.
The co-founder bet
Coulter met her co-founder Reshma over lunch at Chipotle in 2016 — not friends, never colleagues, but aligned on where commerce was headed. After an attempt to simply hire Reshma's agency fell through, Reshma proposed co-founding instead. Nine years on, they're still aligned, and Coulter's read is that it lasted because of shared values, not overlapping skills: she's business-first, Reshma design-first, and the partnership made each of them better.
"Doing AI" vs. actually leveraging it
The sharpest exchange is about AI. Bryan, running an AI company himself, offers a contrarian read from a three-week operator tour: most brands are "doing AI" — generating output — without turning it into real speed. His example: an analyst's beautiful report whose numbers were wrong (the model was "confidently wrong"), built from a manual, un-repeatable process of exporting CSVs and screenshots. Coulter's counter is that Summersalt hit a tipping point precisely because it had a foundation to point AI at — a departing chief-of-staff's 20-page operating manual she could train Claude on instantly, and a brand voice guide documented back in 2017.
Agents as the next channel
On agent-driven commerce, Coulter expects a handful of clear winners and losers and is learning fast without betting yet. Bryan reframes the point: those winners are channels, not brands — the way search and social became channels you pay a tax to be present on. The job isn't to predict them; it's to make sure the brand shows up wherever they land.
Sound Bites
- “We scanned 10,000 women, we made a swimsuit for each of them, and they came back and told us exactly what was right and what was wrong with that fit.”
- “We knew that the swimsuit was the most vulnerable garment she would ever wear in public.”
- “The day we launch, we almost know whether we've got an A, B, C, or D product. If on day one you have a D product, you probably on day 1,000 and day 10,000 have a D product — so you have to be willing to say goodbye.”
- “I believe we internally have hit a tipping point where we actually understand how to utilize the AI.”
The Chord take
Strip away the swimwear and this is a story about foundations. Summersalt's fit advantage isn't a gadget — it's years of structured data feeding a product engine. Its AI gains didn't come from a clever prompt — they came from having documented context (an operating manual, a brand voice guide, clean fit data) to point the model at. Bryan's analyst anecdote is the counterexample: output that's confidently wrong and impossible to repeat isn't leverage, it's noise you have to filter. That's the same bet we make at Chord — AI only works with context. The brands converting AI into real speed are the ones that invested in a foundation first; everyone else is generating output they can't trust or reuse. And the reassuring part of Coulter's answer: you're not behind if you haven't "transformed" yet — the real work is building the foundation that makes transformation possible.
Put it to work
- 1Treat fit and returns data as a proprietary asset: calibrate feedback by style and size and feed it back into product, the way Summersalt drives return rates down.
- 2Protect full-price dynamics — give customers a time-based reason to buy and resist discounting your way to growth.
- 3Read launches fast and act on the signal: grade A/B/C/D early, double down on winners, and kill the losers instead of defending them.
- 4Before scaling AI, build the foundation it needs: document your context (operating procedures, brand voice, data definitions) and govern where the data comes from — that's what turns AI output into actual speed.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Lori Coulter
We scanned 10,000 women, we made a swimsuit for each of them, and they came back to the department store and told us exactly what was right and what was wrong with that fit. We knew that the swimsuit was the most vulnerable garment she would ever wear in public.
Bryan Mahoney
I run an AI company, and so I'm morally obligated to agree with you. I have a fiduciary responsibility to my investors to also agree with. That said, I'm going to take a slightly contrarian view for just a sec. You did this thing that was absolutely impossible, like, and yet you did it, and you did it pre AI. Do you think you actually could have done that any faster?
Lori Coulter
That's fascinating. I don't know.
Bryan Mahoney
Welcome back to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce podcast, where I'm lucky enough to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce behind what I like to say are iconic or next to be iconic brands, and to tell some of their honest stories about what's working and ultimately what's not working. Today, I am thrilled to be joined by Lori Coulter, co founder and CEO of Summersalt. Lori, thank you for being here today.
Lori Coulter
Thanks so much for having me. Really excited for this.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, were just talking about it being warm in your office. Where is your office, actually? Where am I finding you today?
Lori Coulter
So Summersalt is based in St. Louis, Missouri.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, always has been.
Lori Coulter
Always has been. So my co founder, Reshma and I are both, you know, local, I guess, to St. Louis now at this point in our lives. And Summersalt was founded here.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I love that story. And one of the things that you said to me that I have in my notebook here during our prep call was that you're basically a unicorn out there. As I think about, like, the D2C landscape and where most brands tend to be founded, they're kind of on the coast. And it's not just that the brands themselves are on the coast. Their clientele teams tends to be sort of bi coastal, and you're not that. So. So tell me how sort of St. Louis is a part of that story.
Lori Coulter
So it's so. It's interesting, I think, you know, forever consumer marketers have known that Columbus is Columbus, Ohio is kind of known as the perfect test market. And I think the reason is that, you know, if you can sell in Columbus from a scale perspective, you will likely resonate across the United States. And we're not that far from Columbus here in St. Louis, I guess you could say both Midwestern and we have a deep understanding of our consumer, which is kind of women age 25 to 55, affluent, educated, likely traveling, if not in the summer, but certainly throughout the year. And just that deep understanding of what resonates with her has been part of our story. And doing it in a way that might be slightly different from our coastal counterparts, just from a overall product resonance perspective, that's really worked for the brand.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah. So you found the perfect place to incubate a brand like Summersalt. We're three minutes in and I haven't even asked the question, what is Summersalt? Tell me a little bit about the brand and then I've got questions about your background as well.
Lori Coulter
So Summersalt is a women's lifestyle brand focused on women's swimwear and resort wear. We launched in 2017 and focus on the direct channels. So primarily D2C or e-commerce driven. Everything that we sell is our own proprietary designs. We're known for our fit. My background is I had launched a business in partnership with a major department store 15 plus years ago, now doing digital body scanning and made to order swimwear. So we scanned 10,000 women. We made a swimsuit for each of them and they came back to the department store and told us exactly what was right and what was wrong with that fit. We then optimized our pattern library. You know, we had over a million possible combinations of designs literally that really set the stage for our design library and kind of product development engine that we have at Summersalt today. So I met my now co founder along the way. She owned an agency, was operating out of St. Louis, but supporting many of the very well known high profile direct to consumer brands, venture backed on the east coast at the time. In June of 2016, we met for lunch. People find it interesting. We were not personal friends and had never worked together, but we both were like minded kind of in regards to our view on the future of e-commerce. I shared the IP I was sitting on and she shared what she was doing. And that conversation, which by the way was at Chipotle, not intended to be life defining. It was just kind of convenient for us both. So that tells you about our personalities. And I went away from that conversation really inspired to write the initial business plan and strategy for what is now Summersalt. I think what you know, separates founders from everyone else is I just started pursuing what is now the concept of what is now Summersalt, developed a collection and I went back to Reshma in December of 2016 to try to hire her agency. Ironically, she declined. My business didn't explain why, but it turns out she was transitioning out of the agency world, looking for her permanent gig with, you know, a consumer kind of next generation type of brand. And I happened to run into her in January of 2017, still on my way, marching towards launch. But this time were in New York City at what was the Gramercy Park Hotel. And on the spot she said, I'm interested, but would you consider a co founder? And what's fascinating about that is I think we both recognize a unique opportunity to really combine our skill sets, multiply, make ourselves better separately, and then collectively, it really was one plus one equals three. The rest is kind of history. We both had two businesses to unwind, fold into Summersalt, et cetera. We were well on our path to launch, though. We opened a bank account April of 2017, and we launched May 23, 2017, which in retrospect is a little wild from a timeline perspective.
Bryan Mahoney
You didn't know you couldn't do it though.
Lori Coulter
Like, we didn't know how.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Lori Coulter
What, what we found is that investors in the Midwest, where we're based, felt that was a little bit of an aggressive timeline. But you know, venture investors on the west coast, it's literally a checkbox. They're looking for that type of momentum and ability to execute at speed. And, and we did. And we came out of the gates, you know, really in the top 1% of consumer brands from a traction perspective. It was, it was obvious day one, we had, you know, press excitement, the consumer. You know, I think our first month we sold a hundred thousand dollars worth of product, which doesn't sound like a lot today, but at the time was considered a top 1% launch and were well on our way.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's still a real amount of product to get processed through a system, to get into a warehouse, to get out of a warehouse, to get into packages and to get ultimately to customers. I, I had this whole outline written based on what we had talked about before. And this your origin story. I don't know how I didn't ask you those questions before, but I find absolutely fascinating. And what a story. I did agency for nearly 20 years and I sort of accidentally got into D2C when one of our customers was like, can we just hire you? And I was like, well, not really and, but anyways, like one thing led to another and they ended up like, yes, hiring me and then ended up acquiring my agency. And it was this one plus one. In my case, I'm talking about glossier. And right before I got there, Henry and Emily obviously being the founder and CEO, had just met Henry, who she hired to be COO and president. And they didn't know each other before, but their overlap was absolutely perfect. And they didn't know they were looking for each other, but it seemed like they were. And, and these things happen. But your story, I think is even more interesting because I get this question all the time. Like, I've been a founder now for a really long time, since the late 90s actually. And some people like, I want to be a founder. And I was like, well, I don't know. If it's something you just decide to do, it almost becomes this thing, you have this idea, this itch you have to scratch and it's an addiction almost. And it's. And you, you better know what you're signing up for because some days are amazing and other days are super hard. And I have been over 30 plus years of doing it. I consider myself exceptionally fortunate to have found amazing partners or co founders along the way. And that's kind of the other advice that I give people. Like, sometimes being a founder is a really lonely place. And so let's park brand here for a sec. Maybe some advice that you might give someone else who is thinking about starting something and wanting to be a founder. What advice would you give them about the desire to do it alone or the importance of finding a co founder?
Lori Coulter
Well, it's interesting. So venture investors typically see adding a co founder as a really strong signal, mainly because your ability to recruit early on is that's like your first major recruit. And the fact that you can do that, you can attract the talent, really is important. So I think that is a validation point. And then two, you sort of have like duplication as something happens to one person, whatever it is, Redundancy.
Bryan Mahoney
Redundancy. Yeah.
Lori Coulter
More health or whatever, they change their mind. Then you've got redundancy. So I, I think that's why. On the other hand, I have had investors tell me that we are the exception. My two co founders that are still in it nine years in, enjoy working together, get energy, make each other better every single day. So there are horror stories. Right. So I think you just have to decide what's right for you. I have the, you know, benefit of comparing my prior business where I did not have a co founder to the current situation. And I can tell you it is lonely being a solo founder. And I am better because I had a Co founder, which is, I think just, you know, a validation point for sure. As far as advice on starting a business, I have a couple of things. One related to the co founder situation. I don't know that you can just say, today I'm a founder. I have been obsessed with entrepreneurship for a very long time. Reshma and I both had businesses we started as, you know, tweens and teens. Right. And so I was writing many a business plan before, Summersalt through both undergrad and graduate school and had a few starts and stops along the way. So this isn't new. You are absolutely right. It is very hard. And I always say the highs are not as high as you think they are because they come with a lot of work. Right. And problems to solve. And the lows are usually not as low either when you have the hard decisions to make from a negotiating perspective, I'm not talking about internal people, I'm talking about just overall negotiations. A lot of times, I have learned to let other people make the hard decisions. Like force, don't make it easy on them. And so that's just some advice to keep in mind. And then the, the real, I think exciting thing from a co founder perspective for me that I have learned is just recognize the opportunity when it hits you over the head.
Bryan Mahoney
Oh yeah. Don't overthink it.
Lori Coulter
The fact that Reshma and I both were like minded in our view of the brand and where it's going was great. I did not know her personally or professionally, but I respected her work and I felt were both professional enough to make it work. Whether or not were best friends, it didn't matter. Right?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Lori Coulter
And so I knew that her work stood for itself and that it would likely benefit the brand. And it's been one of the best decisions I've ever made.
Bryan Mahoney
One of these things for me anyways, like, there's an awful lot of emphasis on having frameworks and like decision making frameworks and the way that you think. Like I've had four or five co founders across a number of businesses and I don't think there's a framework for finding the right co founder. For me, like it's a lot of it is just like feel and fit. I, when I think about things that have worked well, it's like we weren't necessarily best friends. I didn't decide to get into business with a best friend. Like that's a lifestyle business and that's totally fine. But, but anything that you're sort of staking your career on and you're thinking about the livelihoods of others who are coming to work with you. That founder fit is really important. And as I think about the things that have worked for me, and I'd be curious if they worked for you, is that fundamentally we had the same value system and like we believed the same things and then skills were. There was some overlap, but there was an awful lot of like, I'm going to do this really well and I trust you trust me to do this. I've got this. I'm going to trust you to do this thing and I trust you and you've got this. And we're going to come together in the middle. And the thing that would always bring us back to the middle was that we had the same value system. I think no matter how talented people are, if you're going to fall out of our values, I just, I don't matter. It doesn't matter how much money there is in the world. Like, I just don't think it'll ever work and I don't. I wish. I don't think there's enough of that advice out there actually. I think there's a lot of like, being a founder is amazing and you're like sometimes, but also other times super effing hard. And so just be careful what you wish for.
Lori Coulter
I think, I think you're spot on. And Reshma's and my overlap is interesting in that she's a designer first with a very strong business kind of strategy mind and I'm a business person first, you know, analytical mind first. But I, I lead all product and merchandising today, so I have that bent as well. And obviously there is overlap for the two of us. But I, I can promise you know, Summersalt's brand aesthetic, you know, really everything that you see today has been kind of driven by that kind of mutual view of where we should be going. And we still do almost all creative in house and that's one of the ways we are differentiated from many of our peers is we never used an external agency to do the brand. Many of the Glossier is not a good example of this. But there were many brands that were designed for men and they had agencies that were geared toward men in the DTC space and we knew Summersalt needed to look and feel differently. I just talked about our customer being broadly across the US if we had gone the agency route, I do not believe it would have been as resonant as it truly is so that's a.
Bryan Mahoney
Fantastic segue, I think to. I'm going to keep flipping the script because we're onto something.
Lori Coulter
Let's do it.
Bryan Mahoney
I did want to eventually get to the difference between product and brand. And so you came to market, you had this idea for I'm not gonna. This might be a bit reductive, but a better fitting bathing suit, a better way to buy these things. You're sitting on top of this, inside of all these body scans. And I want to come back to the tech in a sec. But we haven't really talked about the product. We've talked about Summersalt as a brand. And I think the parallel that you're drawing or the counterpoint that you're illustrating to some of those brands that were agency led for men, I think about those more of like product arbitrage opportunities where you needed something that looked fine, but it was more about like, let's just get this product out there. I don't think a lot of those companies had the staying power, not because they didn't ship a good product, but I think maybe they missed the mark on creating a brand that had durability. And so maybe you and your co founder didn't set out to create a durable brand, but I think you've stumbled into that or strategically walked your way towards that. Now again, I can ask you for some advice to anyone who might be listening today is how do you go from fantastic product that develops a following to really building a brand, which is the reason people keep coming back. Or as I said in my cold intro, here is something that people want to take with them on vacation. I think that's a really wonderful place to be. So, yeah, what advice would you have for folks?
Lori Coulter
So I love that you're speaking my language as far as something you take on vacation, because a swimsuit in particular, you're generally buying ahead of a planned trip. You might have a small trip to the pool in your backyard in the summertime, but you've got an event that you're buying for and that's really the deadline. Right. Which by the way is great for brand dynamics or you know, merchandising dynamics and that you have a reason to buy. You typically buy at full price because you have a time based reason to purchase, which means you can't wait for the discounting, which is huge. But we started out just obsessed about product. We knew that the swimsuit was the most vulnerable garment she would ever wear in public. And we came to it with just really high empathy. I Have a somewhat funny story about being on vacation when I was about 12 years old and my mom losing her swimsuit somewhere on the Disney World resort property. And it being a major crisis because it was our absolute favorite swimsuit and all that. To be said, women feel vulnerable, emotional, and committed to the garments that work and fit for them. And so if you can give her that confidence, which we do with Summersalt, you have so much loyalty. And the data had kind of shown that out brands that develop a following over time, historically in the swimwear space literally held 80% of that consumer's wallet on swimwear spend going forward. So we knew that swimwear had that sticking kind of power, and we've certainly seen it in our cohorts moving forward. And you can think about it as an entry into her suitcase per se, is how we'd say it at Summersalt. And then you have permission and trust to sort of fill out that suitcase over time.
Bryan Mahoney
I love the, the permission word. Maybe an insight for a future product line for you. Men in their late 40s and early 50s are vulnerable about their swimsuits, too.
Lori Coulter
That's good to hear. No, we see a lot of opportunity in other garment categories, and certainly I hear requests from men frequently.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I want to keep pulling on this thread about the sort of obsessing about product, but. But also sort of like just understanding the psychology of the vulnerability there and having that be a part of the brand as opposed to, you know, you see an awful lot of other brands that you'd sort of like, find on vacation around the pool that are much more of, like, lifestyle and this is the life. This is how you should look, this is how you should feel. And you're sort of like, yeah, but that's not how I feel. So what have you two sort of unlocked in terms of like, yeah. Meeting customers where they are from an empathy point of view, because it seems to really be working.
Lori Coulter
So. So we always say it has to be aspirational. So a little bit different. We're not a brand that's not aspirational. She has to be almost like your cooler best friend down the street. Right. She's chic, she has the inside knowledge, and she's. She's going to help you, but she's accessible. And that's how we think about the brand. We obsess about it. A lot of, A lot of people are surprised to know that I still participate in fittings for all of our garments, that we're bringing out anything that we're producing. I'm seeing it at multiple stages of development, you know, everything from concept, trend and concept, print development, et cetera, all the way to, you know, fittings as we're developing new silhouettes, new fabrications, et cetera. And then of course, finally pre production and then I test all the product after the fact too. And what's fascinating about our process is that, you know, post summer, we will gather all the data on every single return that we receive. We will calibrate the feedback by style, by size. And we ask the consumer, is it too long, too short, is it too loose, too tight, is it too much coverage, too little coverage? We're able to calibrate and see by size of feedback. And it's amazing the improvement we have in our return rates over time because of our ability to really use the data to improve the fit. Never mind the technology. Like you mentioned earlier that we had early on, we had already started from, you know, a base that the industry would just be, you know, kill to have. Right. Yeah. So we already had an optimized fit and we continue to optimize over time.
Bryan Mahoney
So. So as I think about the. That's amazing, like the sort of the willingness to go and to look at the feedback, to incorporate it into the process to keep getting better over time. And I would think selfishly, it improves the overall economics of the business because like, returns are the one thing that sort of hurt us in D2C. The other thing I think that hurts us is a lack of discipline when it comes to discounting. I think it's really easy to acquire customers if you're willing to give away $10 worth of product for $5. And as I was doing my research and one of the things that you sort of clued me into is that you do take a very disciplined approach. So again, I'm going to put you on the spot here and ask you for some advice. If you're a brand and you're thinking about your acquisition and your retention strategy, you know, how do you take a disciplined approach to discounting but still balance it out with like hitting your growth goals and, you know, you need new customers and you want those customers.
Lori Coulter
Coming back, I think the product has to be there to begin with. You cannot have, you know, just product for product's sake. And we are very good at, from a product development engine perspective, we're fast, we can be prolific and have been in the past. And what I've found is it's very important for me to do the pattern matching Both the data as well as my gut reactions to product that we're developing and just be incredibly disciplined in regards to what we're actually bringing to market. Does the consumer really want this? And then we usually when we test a new silhouette, we're going to test it in one of our core, a few of our core solids because we really want to get a read on the consumer's reaction to the silhouette, not to the print or, you know, some other emotional response to something. Design wise. We want to know how does this actually fit and does she keep it and is she buying it? And it's amazing. You know, the day we launch, we almost know whether we've got an A, B, C or D product almost every time. And I, you know, it's a little bit discouraging for consumer founders because if on day one you have a D product, you probably on day one you.
Bryan Mahoney
Got a D product. Yeah.
Lori Coulter
Probably on day 1,000 and probably on day 10,000. So you just have to be willing to say goodbye.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Lori Coulter
To that product.
Bryan Mahoney
I hadn't thought about that framing in a long, long time. But glossier was very much a. Even though we tried to get away from it like this, a launch driven culture. And we would introduce new product and we would obsess about that product and every single time we thought our customers were going to love it. But over time we would start to bet on like, this is going to be an A launch and this is going to be a B launch and we would make corresponding investments that way. And you're absolutely right. You would know within like, I think in our case, I mean, I'm going back a number of years, but probably within a week. It was probably in the first couple days you're like, okay, we thought B,.
Lori Coulter
You have a good idea.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, you have a good idea. Sometimes you're going to be surprised, but I think more often than not, like you, it, the data is the data and you know, you only have so much influence over it. So.
Lori Coulter
But back to your question about how to make sure you have discipline. It's just not to over buy, test and learn and then come back with the bigger launches. That's really how we do it. And we too believe in freshness and newness. In D2C is incredibly important. It is a window dressing, I guess, of D2C. You've got to have a reason to speak to the consumer and give her something else to buy. So we are all in on that. It's just the disciplined approach and the pattern matching Just be confident enough in your own kind of gut instincts to say, okay, this is a dud, or. And moving on.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, yeah, you can't. You can't get everything right. You can't fall in love with the idea so much that, you know, being you want to be right at all costs, even though, you know the signals are telling you like, yeah, we got this one wrong. And that's okay. Not just don't do it again and again. Yeah, learn from those mistakes. I should probably try to segue us abruptly into tech. And one of the things that I wrote down in my notes was that there's a tech component to what you're doing and maybe more so in the business that you were involved with first. But you're not doing tech for tech's sake. Like, it's informing ultimately the product. It's leading ultimately to a better fit. And I think about this through the lens of my own business, where I'm thinking about, go to market and what's going to resonate. And I can be guilty of over explaining the product and talking about, like, how. How technically sound it is. But if I'm speaking to a marketer, they're just sort of like, tell me what's in it for me? You know, what. What is the. The ultimate outcome? So I'm just curious, like, because there is technology and data going into ultimately making the product an awful lot better, do you struggle at all to balance that out, or do you really just focus on the brand building pillars? Like, I guess what I'm trying to say is in a clumsy way is the fact that you've done all of this work, is it important to building trust in your customers that the garment that they're going to try from you, maybe the first time is going to fit better, or does that not matter?
Lori Coulter
I think it's part of our promise to the consumer and certainly the kind of validation point that she may need to convert initially. I think it's even more important for that repeat customer though, right? She can trust us. What we're making is the same over and over again from a fit perspective. And that's how we kind of think about it and across styles. Now she's going to have her favorite styles and certain silhouettes look better on certain people, et cetera. And we're not perfect, however, just that consistency and the ability to say, this is my brand, I know how it looks on my body. I got a deadline and I need this swimsuit for XYZ trip. I'm Going back to them. That's really what we want her to be thinking.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I trust it.
Lori Coulter
Yeah. And then we are digitally native as a brand. Right. We launched online, started online, and we hire people that have, you know, excellent tech skills. And while we don't, you know, develop, I guess, SaaS platforms per se. Right. We're, we're extreme users of almost all and the tech stack is enormous as you know, and a brand like just gets almost too unwieldy. We've sort of stepped back and say, okay, what's really providing value? Where can we consolidate our tech stack? Like, we don't want to have so many vendors, which has been an interesting, like I've been saying, now you're speaking.
Bryan Mahoney
My love language, Lori. Now you're speaking my love language.
Lori Coulter
Yeah, Right. And so we've had to identify where we want to lean in, who's really the value partners that we're wanting to be with long term. And I just think it's an incredibly exciting time for brands like Summersalt where we can add, you know, efficiency with AI in many, almost every area of the business, you know, operationally and see that those productivity gains in real time. It's like every week we see AI kind of solving a problem for us in a new way. And I, I don't think brands are going to look the same six and 12 months from now as they do today. We're going to all be that much better. And those brands that don't evolve are really going to have a hard time.
Bryan Mahoney
I mean, I run an AI company and so I'm morally obligated to agree with you. I have a fiduciary responsibility to my investors to also agree with. That said, I'm going to take a slightly contrarian view for just a sec. For just a sec. Let's hear me out or humor me. I was in Los Angeles yesterday and I did a lunch and learn with, I think there's about 25 people sitting around the table, mostly brand operators. And I'd been on this sort of like three week learning tour, just sort of seeing how people were using AI because on the one hand, like, it feels magic, like, and I am getting good results personally and I'm seeing how it's impacting the team at Chord and what we're able to do in what feels faster than maybe we've achieved it before. And I talked to brands and they're like, we're not quite sure, you know, we're not getting the ROI, you're not getting the ROI out of it just yet. And so I came up with this thing where someone showed me how they were using AI and I was like, okay. What I think we're seeing across the industry is like people quote unquote doing AI and they're getting output, but they're not necessarily putting that output necessarily to good use just yet. So the contrarian point of view that I want to run by you said, I don't remember the date, whether it was 2017 or 2018, but you did this thing that was absolutely impossible. And yet you did it. And you did it pre AI. So you were going really fast back then with hard work and grit and you had some amount of tech and now you have AI. Do you think you actually could have done that any faster?
Lori Coulter
That's fascinating. I don't know. So what you said is interesting about the brand founders. If you Talked to me six to 12 months ago, I probably would have said exactly the same thing. I believe we internally have hit a tipping point where we actually understand how to utilize the AI. And so that's the difference. And let me give you, I can give you a concrete example that is not rocket science. Right. I've had a long time executive assistant. She's essentially like a chief of staff, someone I trust implicitly who left recently to start her own business. And we're very proud of her.
Bryan Mahoney
I love that. That's the best graduation story.
Lori Coulter
Yeah, yeah, I love to throw off founders and if we don't have at least a few more, I'm going to be very disappointed. But. So she's doing her own thing. But she had left me a 20 page document in regards to how she managed everything for me. And it's literally a bible. It's an operating system, an elite executive administrator, executive assistant. And so from a training perspective, Claude can automatically like, I can train Claude immediately because everything's in that single document. And now over time I have to continue. But that alone provided so much efficiency just and got us up to speed that much faster. We have a similarly, we have a brand tone kind of guide already developed in 2017, 2018. We wouldn't have had these things that really allow that starting point. So I don't know. We also have, you know, vision wasn't.
Bryan Mahoney
As big and you see, you held the brand voice and tone internally between the two of you or three of you. And so it was okay. Now the team is bigger and I think those use cases make perfect sense to me. They also like corroborate What I'm hearing, like a lot of companies are using Claude and they are trying to figure out how to leverage it more in a way that is collaborative. It does feel like there's an awful lot of digital assistance running around and people are getting utility that way. But the governance and the coordination across organizations, like the light bulb moment for me is I sat beside this analyst and they showed me this, essentially this report they created that made me. I was like, I don't even know why I have a company if this is how they're doing it. Like, this output is fantastic. And I said, can you please take me through how you did it? He's like, absolutely. I logged into these 10 systems, downloaded these 15 CSVs, uploaded them to Claude, and then I logged into two other systems that I couldn't export data from. So I took screenshots, I uploaded the screenshots, I uploaded this to Claude, I prompted Claude and it gave me this report. And I was like, this report. He's like, actually, no, the numbers were wrong. The graphs looked really good though, but the numbers were all wrong. And he's like, but he was analyst, so he knew the numbers were wrong. And so he kept prompting it. But at first when he asked Claude, they were like, no, these numbers are right. And he's like, are you sure? And he's like, oh, actually, no, you're right, the numbers are wrong. And I find the LLMs, as powerful as they are, they're very happy to be confidently wrong. And then you're almost like, right.
Lori Coulter
I've had.
Bryan Mahoney
And so at the end of this conversation, I said to him, this report is beautiful. Imagine next week when you want to deliver the same thing to the SLT. How do you do it? And he's like, well, I just repeat this process. And I was like, that to me is like doing AI, but not actually leveraging AI to go faster. We need to find, I think, strike the right balance between a good foundation. I get this 20 page manual for how we do things. Where do we get our data from? How are we governing some of this? Because the other thing I'm hearing from Brands is like the pace seems to have increased, or people feel exhausted by the pace, but I'm not seeing the output necessarily correlating with like the pace that we're feeling, the pace that you described that you were able to achieve in 2017 and 2018. It feels like there's a lot of output that people are now like, God, I gotta filter through all of this stuff that AI is generating. I believe you, by the way, that in the future brands need to continue to transform. I don't think the transformation has happened. This is the message I'm trying to deliver. You're not behind if you haven't transformed. No, you're okay.
Lori Coulter
Yeah, I think there's a, a tipping point where were kind of trying to figure it out and now we're seeing efficiency gains. But, but you know, if you think about where we are in that cycle of the trend, like, we're down here.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, yeah.
Lori Coulter
At Summersalt and certainly in general.
Bryan Mahoney
So there's a lot of honesty there and already you've given like a lot of really honest answers. You know, like, not the. I'm just going to tell you what I think you want to hear, but like, no, this is it. Like, brand building is hard. Finding a co founder is hard here. The adoption curve, we're starting to see it, but we're super early on and there's a lot of room to grow. I, I have one last question for you. I'm excited to hear this answer. Do you, like, as you think about how you're marketing to your customer and what's resonating and you know, why they love the brand in the future, no matter where we are on this adoption curve, how important is it for your brand to resonate with virtual agents that might be shopping on behalf of their human counterparts otherwise? I'm trying not to say agentic commerce because I don't know how I feel about it just yet. But for a brand where like discovery and vulnerability is such a big part of it. Is there. Are you thinking about that at all?
Lori Coulter
So, so I, I liken it back to sort of how discovery maybe went from you know, in store to just maybe it was basic search originally and then now we're in a social kind of discovery kind of environment. Right. Or a lot of discovery is happening on social media. I suspect that there will be clear winners and losers in agent e commerce. Now, who they are going to be? I am not willing to take a bet yet, but there are going to be winners and losers and I assume it's not going to be many. It's probably gonna. There is going to be a handful of clear winners that emerge that we're going to have to all adapt to. So I just, I agree that it's coming when I'm not sure and in what form and who, I don't know. But we are trying to learn as much as we can as soon as we can. I'm not sure it's caught right. Like, I don't know that I really want to be shop. Like that's the discovery piece. I'm not sure there's nothing right, but we'll see.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, it feels very businessy to me. Like I love to shop. Like I love to discover brands. And I think maybe I'll use a tool for discovery to help me whittle down the brands that I want to go and get to know. Yeah, I don't know. I'm with you though. I'm with you though. But the other thing, I don't know if you realize you said it, but I think it was really smart, is that there will be some winners. And I think what you're describing is that you're not talking about brands that are going to win. You're talking about channels. Kind of like when you're like. And Google are channels. Like we're kind of just paying them a tax, but we need to be there because everyone else is there. And you're gonna have to make sure that Summersalt is in whatever these winners are. And I am hearing that from like the really smart brands and operators are like, we're thinking about these as other channels. Like we want to be where our customers are and we want to make sure that we're a part of that conversation. So geez, that's probably a really good place to, to sort of wrap up now. I told you I was excited for this conversation. I didn't realize how excited I was. I've done 30, 40 of these now. And the through line, when I think about the connecting all of these dots about what it means to be iconic brand, it's the same thing. It's like, make the right investments in tech, but don't over invest in technology. Know your customer, but at the end of the day, just ship fantastic products that customers love. And you're not going to get it right all the time, but if you get it right more often than not, then customers are going to keep coming back. And I think just being willing to be honest and vulnerable and out there with them, I think is some fantastic advice. So Lori, I can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast, for turning off your AC and warming your way through this. This was a fantastic conversation and I'm already looking forward to the next one.
Lori Coulter
Well, very energizing brain. Really enjoyed it and thanks so much for having me.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, awesome.