MOO’s Corin Mills on AI Adoption: Using Tools To Create More Customer Face Time, Not Less

Bryan Mahoney

Good morning or good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce behind today's iconic — or, as I like to say, soon-to-be-iconic — brands. This morning, my time, this afternoon, Corin's time, I'm thrilled to be joined by Corin Mills, who is VP of Products, Brand, and E-commerce at MOO. Corin, thanks for joining me on the podcast today.

Corin Mills

Hey, thanks for having me on. It's great to get into some chat on commerce.

Bryan Mahoney

We've already covered, somewhat subtly, the fact that we're in different time zones. So where am I finding you today?

Corin Mills

I'm in London. MOO was started in the UK, but its main focus is actually the US, so I've got teams in the US on the east coast — Boston and Providence — as well. But we've also got a big headquarters in London, so it's nice to experience the world a bit.

Bryan Mahoney

That's funny — I mentioned to you in our quick warm-up that I've been a MOO customer for, geez, more than a decade, and I had no idea the company was headquartered in the UK. I just assumed, given its penetration in the North American and specifically the US market, that it was a US-based company. So that was an interesting discovery. And in doing a little research, you've had a really interesting background in brand, in marketing, in commerce, and there's a lot I want to unpack. But maybe take a minute or two and give me a bit of your background, and then we'll dive into the conversation.

Corin Mills

Yeah, of course. I suppose starting at the beginning is the perfect place to start. My background is in product design — physical product design was what I studied, and that was my passion — and I shifted that into retail design early on. It wasn't too dissimilar, let's say, to e-commerce — a site, a store, is very much the demonstration of a business in action. So it was working across the business: how do you take a brand, a product, the offers, the personality, all of those things, and bring it to life for customers, but have the service behind it. So it was quite a complex, customer-focused start to my career, which then slowly shifted me toward more of a passion around the central strategy of a business and brand, and how that changes. I started in the telco space — brands like T-Mobile, but also EE here in the UK, which is a bit of a wider offer. Then I shifted quickly into brand in general, at a global agency called Wolff Olins. I did that for a number of years, and my job was actually to be the client, inside the agency. It was nice to bring some of that experience — four or five years of just being a sponge, soaking up all these different sectors, from art to big e-commerce brands, insurance, finance institutions. I got a chance to work with the Googles of this world, the Axes of this world, but also small galleries trying to do something. At the heart of it was strong brand strategy brought to life with a strong visual design that worked with a business's unique offer, and bringing those things together and helping clients do that. I did that for a number of years, and then an opportunity came up — in the UK there's a brand similar to Best Buy called Currys. It was cool — around eleven-ish brands in total, so there was a huge job to transform that business into a singular brand, internally and externally for customers, rather than having these eleven brands all across service and all these different offers. So I took on this REEF branding project for a number of years, where I also picked up things like advertising, marketing, social, and CRM along the way. Finished up the rebrand, did a few years of the advertising campaigns, and thought, what's next? And that's where e-commerce came in — I worked a lot with digital teams over many years, particularly around rebranding, and that whole world had shifted from the beginning of my career to the rise of e-commerce. My role at MOO is a mixture of brand, marketing, experience, and then the digital and e-commerce side. It's been great to join MOO, a brand that believes in design and the power it can have, and to help shift the marketing, the branding, but also the e-commerce side of things. It's been great to be at MOO for the last three years.

Bryan Mahoney

Time flies, huh? That's a fascinating background. I spent nearly twenty years in agency, doing a lot of physical product design and brand design, and then grew up in e-commerce, so there's an awful lot I want to get into. You gave us a bit of background on MOO, but maybe tell the listeners a little more — what is MOO? What would I expect to find on the MOO website? I bet a lot of folks have ordered from the site or received a product from it before and didn't necessarily know where it came from.

Corin Mills

Yeah, exactly, and that's kind of one of our strengths — that we're actually a B2B brand. That's what we do. We help people brand things, put in its simplest form, and we like that it comes from a belief in great design for everyone. It started in the print world, and it brought more luxury print techniques — what we'd call 'looks' — really thick, beautiful print and substrates, into a mass-market audience. So the quality is quite remarkable. Print was the big thing, and business cards, actually, was the big growth driver in the US. Then it grew exponentially, and as you grow, you look at other areas. The business card market is surprisingly — you'd have thought, obviously, COVID was a big wobble — but it's kind of strong. But it is a singular platform, and you don't want all your eggs in one basket. So over the last few years — and one of the reasons I joined MOO is that at the heart of it, MOO is about helping people brand, bringing brands to life — we've looked wider than just the obvious print stuff, like postcards. We're going big in stickers at the moment, with a load of products launching there. But it's also notebooks, planners, water bottles, branded merch — promotional products, as the US would say. So it's been nice to take the success story of print, which is bringing quality to a wider audience, and apply that in new spaces. It's been a nice adventure over a couple of years.

Bryan Mahoney

I think the quality as the through-line is really interesting. There's this unfortunate but also fun category — in the US we'd call it swag.

Bryan Mahoney

And a lot of times I think about swag as a race to the bottom. But if I'm going to put my company's logo on something, I want the recipient to be really excited, or proud, to put it on. That's how it looks, how it's been designed, how it feels. My interactions with MOO have always communicated that — it wasn't a business card I was embarrassed to give away, or a notebook I didn't want to write in, it always felt great. And I think that starts with the digital experience of finding your customer, inviting them into the process, introducing them to these design tools, all the way through to receiving the product and being excited to give it out, whether you're giving it to your company, or to customers, or to prospects. That was really important. So this notion of brand, where quality seems to be one of the key tenets — how do you encourage the team to think about storytelling, starting that digitally, with something you can't necessarily feel, but communicating that it's not just another printed product — that's actually one of the differentiators for the platform and for the brand.

Corin Mills

Good question. I think if we start digitally, firstly there's extra care and attention applied to the visuals of the piece, and I think we have to sometimes look wider than necessarily the pure UX design side of it. But at the same time, that storytelling aspect has to be woven through the site, done in a way where customers want it, not getting in the way. So the starting point, as a brand, is that we have some strong beliefs — we believe in real connections, and that they have more of an impact. We believe in that quality, and we take the time to make sure our communications have that. At the heart of it, we do believe in the benefit of design. So we start with the storytelling — we put an emphasis on CRM and the digital conversation, but then we quickly shift to getting the product in hand. This morning, for instance, I was working on a strategy deck around sampling for 2026. Over the last two years we've shifted and really put an emphasis on making it, as we'd say, a micro-transaction — from an advert, someone can order a sample pack as seamlessly as possible, because we want to get our products in customers' hands. B2B, business can sometimes be a bit boring. But getting the excitement of a simple transaction into a more complex world — where there's design, and sometimes subscriptions — by focusing on that, it's really helped us demonstrate where we stand. Lastly, it's also just about real human service. You're always just one phone call away from a real designer or a real person who will help you. We use AI, we use tools, we love technology — at the heart of MOO is technology, to do more. But on top of that, having that real human side of the business has really helped get across those real connections. So, strong brand beliefs, putting our money where our mouth is in terms of sampling, and always taking that little bit of extra care. Storytelling is kind of the big three.

Bryan Mahoney

I think the storytelling piece is huge, and I like that you brought up AI. To me, some of the magic in what you all do is that it's not using AI to get rid of the humans — the human component to this is really important. So how do you use these tools to actually deliver a better physical product or digital experience, in a way that feels intuitive, feels part of the brand, doesn't feel transactional? I get a chance to talk to a lot of people about sampling, and I think that's a really interesting strategy — you want to get that product into people's hands so they can ultimately feel that quality. If my research is correct, you went through a rebrand in 2024 on the MOO side of things, largely under your direction. What was the motivation for that?

Corin Mills

Although my CV might not necessarily show it, I'm not necessarily a firm believer in rebrands as the answer. I think it's often ego-led, or the easiest thing to do. Rebrands are big jobs, but sometimes looking into product strategy, or the architecture of a business, will have much more of an impact on your performance — actually, some of the marketing planning can be hugely complex, from doing customer research right through to the product and price in place. It was clear at MOO that after a number of years of having a really strong brand in a very commoditized market, some competitors had caught up, and naturally — it had been ten-plus years since the previous visual change — the world had changed a lot in that time. So there was some best practice to put back in, getting our brand assets working hard, keeping the logo, keeping the name strong. I wouldn't call it revolution — I'd call it evolution. Let's not change the name just for the sake of it, because I've joined the business and want something different, or the founders got bored of it. It wasn't any of that — it was smart thinking. The main thing was there was a tightening of the identity, a modernizing of it, and it was coupled with a shift of strategy for the business into new areas, new products. So we designed the system to allow us to communicate wider than just print. In 2024, we set off to visually shape things up, make it more digital, fit the new strategy of the business, and get a bit more of that best practice in — so the assets worked harder, but that didn't stop there. Personality of the brand is something we've been trying to dial up more and more over the last two years, because in a commoditized market, we needed to tell more stories, so we wanted to have more of a belief and attitude about it.

Bryan Mahoney

I love that. So much of what you're hitting on, too — it can be an internal tool. Externally, our customers might read a slightly different story, or get introduced to a slightly more nuanced personality, but it's still the brand they know. Internally, it's an opportunity to refocus and look strategically at how we're going to roll this out, and what the different assets are that we ultimately want to leverage. I'd imagine, in this instance, your agency experience — being able to go in, understand, and then deliver a system, and ultimately help the teams deploy it — must have served you well here.

Corin Mills

Yeah, I think that was particularly useful, because businesses like ours — we're a hundred-million-plus brand, we're not a small business, we've been around for a number of years, but we're not huge either — you don't have this big brand team who can pick up a rebrand and transform it. It was really useful to come off the back of a major transformation project where I'd been client-side, but also bring that agency-side experience and just start where the impact is, where there's a quick win. There was a whole planning process, consistent across most implementation plans — high impact, ease: those are the things that are easy to do, you start there. But then there's the high-impact stuff that takes years but has such a big impact that you need to get going on it. So there was a big prioritization focus that I helped the teams with. The great thing at MOO is you've got a ton of people who were keen to get going on it and embraced that challenge early on. The tough bit is sometimes slowing things down, when people are like, 'no, let's not change that already, we've done this work, let's just put that best practice in.' So sometimes it was the opposite — it was slowing it down in places where there was a bit too much change happening.

Bryan Mahoney

I think it's important to have that experience, to be able to encourage that patience, and also to balance out measuring the return on an investment like brand investment. One of the things that really stood out to me as I looked through your career is that more often than not, brand was in your title, and brand came before things like e-commerce or marketing. I don't think there's a better person I can ask this question of. As I think about brands who are looking to strike that balance between what's become known as performance marketing — dollars I'm going to allocate to acquire customers, which are arguably easier to measure, you can sort of say, well, I spent X amount of dollars and acquired Y amount of customers, so I know what my return on investment is — versus twinning that against investments in brand, which tend to be a bit harder to measure. Given the decade-plus of experience you have investing in brand, what advice would you have for other companies or founders to strike that right balance between brand investment and pure performance marketing dollars?

Corin Mills

It's a real tough one. I think every business I've worked with has struggled with that balance. I think first and foremost, it starts internally, in terms of belief. There's tons of data out there that shows the stronger the awareness investment, the better your performance marketing works — which is kind of common sense, but—

Bryan Mahoney

It's hard to argue, but it's difficult to point at the exact reason.

Corin Mills

Yeah. Now, the difficulty is seeing that internally within your business — it's really hard to do. On top of that, it's very easy to look at those performance charts and say, look, there's the proof, and then go, yeah, but now you risk it — now you've risked the revenue for the next three months as we transition. So I think, first of all, it's getting teams to agree that the way they're individually working shouldn't be siloed. So often the structure of a business has accidentally caused that, by having a performance marketing team over here with a different set of goals and objectives, and a brand team over there. It's about bringing those together — not necessarily structurally, but mission-wise, or OKR-wise — to work together. What you'll soon realize is that by working together you'll greatly help each other. Ideally, you have a strong econometrics model — I've worked in a business that had a really good ten-year-old model that had slowly been refined, so you could see the benefit of upper funnel, awareness, brand, why-us messaging. But even if you don't have that, to me it just comes back to common sense — if a customer doesn't know who you are, or what you believe in, or offer versus your competitors — even in the most cutthroat, bottom-of-funnel market, search, any ad, and you're sweating those numbers for little percentage-point improvements on your spend, surely it makes sense that having a brand someone knows and is favorable to will add to that. It's an old example now, but the best one is McDonald's — they found great success in performance marketing on the ninety-nine-pence cheeseburger, running that advert and that menu. Low-value, cost-focused food, and performance marketing working well. They ran that for years, but they found the performance of that was drifting down, because they'd stopped investing in explaining why McDonald's. So they shifted — they started investing in restaurants again, from an experience point of view. They started to localize the message, US cattle versus UK beef. They started to talk about why McDonald's, and all of a sudden the performance marketing team saw stronger performance. The awareness was working. So keep it simple. The starting point has to be the structure of your business, and who you ask to do that task, and just that belief. A side point is that data is key, but deep down, that PPC search that's scooping up that last-click methodology, which most people still rely on because it's the easiest — deep down, no one just searches a brand name randomly and goes that way for no reason. And that's thickening in today's AI world, it's going to be even more important. So I think there's a false security in those numbers that those teams don't like to admit to. And getting people to admit to that first is an important step, and being able to change.

Bryan Mahoney

Really, really insightful. There's this false sense of security, but we know we've been consumers forever, and there's that connection — I think it's about being able to trust your gut. I think about some of the brands I use the term iconic for all the time — those I most associate with are the ones that do a great job of storytelling. They're the ones that take chances sometimes on these crazy campaigns, and I applaud the courageousness. They're out there, and they're not always going to get it right, but they're investing in getting to know me more, and me getting to know them a little bit more. And sometimes I'll just put more trust in the fact that the actual product I'm going to get is going to be a better experience. If I feel like I'm just being targeted, that moves me further away from the brand. If it's always about promos, or always about being followed around the internet and compelled to make a purchase, I'm not interested. Tell me a great story, ship me a great product, invest in performance marketing to get that story out there. I love when brand teams work with the teams that understand how to leverage those channels to get the message out — it's a wonderful use of bringing organizations together and collaborating. But I want to see more investment here, and I think we're going to. The other thing you sort of hinted at is this notion of AI, or agentic commerce. If we believe what we're reading, there are going to be agents running around doing all the shopping for us — I think it'll be more like personal shoppers, where I might hint that I want something, and an agent proposes five or six options for me, and I quickly make a decision based on the relationship I have with those brands. 'Oh, I just saw this campaign, of course, please choose that one,' and the agent finishes the transaction. I don't think it's going to be that automatic, though — I hope the purest consumer in me, the one that loves to discover brands and interact with them, is still involved in the loop. So I think more than ever we're going to see people finding the confidence to say we have to invest in both — it's not just about acquiring customers, or retaining them, or growing their share of wallet. We've got to twin that with the right investments in brand. And sometimes that's a rebrand, or an evolution. I think that's absolutely crucial.

Corin Mills

I'm going to go off on a slight tangent, but if you look at printed direct mail — at the start of the digital marketing revolution, it became the cheapest thing. No one really wanted to work on it: cheapest design, cheapest substrates, make it cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. And who'd have thought it stopped working, because it was just promo, it wasn't interesting. That wasn't because the medium was wrong, necessarily — it's because of the value and the production put into it. I think we're still the same with CRM: now it's just volume, it's just noise. We sign up to get those emails — 'get your first purchase off, 10%' — and who sits and reads all those? There are a few companies that do it so well that you actually do want to read it and engage. I'd like to hope that as we shift into the AI world — in a world where, right now, content over the last few years is written for SEO purposes really, not to actually educate — I want to give a tool to my audience to enlighten them, not just write content for SEO, which is what the vast majority of brands do. I hope this shift will make people stop and go, 'hang on a minute, write some genuine stuff.' Now, the cynical part of me thinks there's always going to be a way to game the system, particularly here, so there's definitely going to be some of that going on. But I do think it will make people up their game, and stop and think: am I doing this from a convenience point of view, or because it's genuinely the right thing to do?

Bryan Mahoney

I think upping the game is key, and upping the game doesn't mean just leveraging tools to produce a bunch of generic content — that's not accretive to a brand. It's more about how you use these tools to create content that's really going to be resonant to agents. Yes, but agents are ultimately representing humans, and as long as we keep the human in the loop, I think we're going to be okay. Before we run out of time here — one of the things I read, or heard you say, that I wanted to get your point of view on, speaking of upping our games, is the recommendation to not conflate a replatform with a redesign, and not to do the two together. I thought I was the only one on record saying, never fall into this trap. I know it's tempting, when you're going through a rebrand or a redesign, to think about changing the underlying tools, or vice versa. So as someone with that agency experience, and a ton of experience going through these brand evolutions and platform changes, what advice would you have for folks who are looking at adopting some of these tools, to make sure they stay focused on the outcome they want, and don't let the project blow up in scope?

Corin Mills

I think so often what happens with transformation is you join transformations together. I've worked in a business where people tried to join a replatform and a rebrand together, and you're basically asking for — in short — potentially an agile-run, front-end-and-back-end, very complex project, joined to a company-wide, because a brand touches every part of the business, basically waterfall-led project, together. Of course it's going to be pretty hard to keep those things aligned, on track, and on time, and you'll end up dragging one behind the other, or just causing more chaos. Now imagine trying to design and replatform a system when the system you're using itself is being redesigned from a UX, visual point of view. So from my point of view, the heart of replatforming normally brings simpler to update, easier to design, easier to bring to life, because best practice, from a front-end point of view, of a replatform on the back end will be a better customer experience — more seamless, more convenient. And naturally, within the design itself of that front end, you need to have digital guidelines. But the flexibility that a new platform brings means you don't have to join it with the rebrand. You can get the rebrand out of the way, or save it, get the replatform out of the way, and then apply it afterward — as long as you can have it running at the same time in the background of a company. But those deadlines should not be mixed, in my opinion, because you're going to struggle to align them. So my experience, when it comes to cross-functional, business-wide transformation: don't try to join them up. But you can, behind the scenes, have really good collaboration between the teams working on them, so whichever one goes first is ready for the one that's coming second.

Bryan Mahoney

I love that advice, and I'd never thought about it as the potential conflict between an agile process for a digital transformation and a waterfall process for a brand redesign. I obviously encourage people, if you're going through digital transformation, to get through it as fast as you can, and the best way to slow that down is to throw a redesign into the mix, or vice versa. So that's super interesting.

Corin Mills

There's also the complexities of knowing what's working. If you change too many of the fundamentals, it's very hard to know how.

Bryan Mahoney

Do you get signal, on how things are working?

Corin Mills

Yeah, exactly. For all you know, it could well be some cosmetic change that's actually happening and has changed the strategy — because, just to go back and re-emphasize the point, often what happens is when you do take a rebrand and put it into a digital transformation, that's all that's happening. There's no substance to that rebrand — it's just a cosmetic job, and that's not healthy. A rebrand should be linked to a strategic change of the business. So that's even more of a reason not to link those two things together.

Bryan Mahoney

And I like this idea of, how do we measure the effectiveness? The other thing I'll encourage brands to think about is to have conviction, too, because a lot of times, early on in a rebrand process, maybe you're not really getting the results. Yes, we want to listen to the feedback and incorporate it — sometimes we have to trust our gut. Why did we embark on this mission, and how do we see it all the way through without being stubborn? If the market isn't responding well to it, or the customer isn't resonating, then you need to adjust. But you can't panic either — the first time you see it, don't just go the other way. You can't undo it all. And so it's having that wherewithal, that experience, to say, okay, what is the data telling us? What is the feedback? How do we adjust? But remember what the goal of this process was — it was to move us forward in this way, or to educate the market about this change we're embarking on. And that just takes experience, sometimes experiencing confidence.

Corin Mills

Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

Bryan Mahoney

I can't let us go before we talk about AI — I think we've danced around it throughout the conversation. I'm curious, at MOO, how have you and your teams adopted AI internally? When did you get started, and are you really realizing tangible benefits, in the form of maybe more creative expression, or efficiencies? And bonus points if we can talk about how you're thinking about introducing AI for your customers, to be able to interact with the brand.

Corin Mills

It's an interesting one, isn't it? Because we talk about AI, and this is an obvious thing to say, but right from probably the last ten, fifteen years, it's been a part of any process that involves any form of digital — be that Adobe Suite having Photoshop basically doing it in a manual way. Now, obviously, the big shift is that kind of intelligence that sits behind it — the clue is in AI, the second letter. So I think there's a lot of false stuff going around at the moment that is still good to do but isn't strictly speaking AI, and tasks are just getting a bit better and simpler. But our belief is that there's nothing like — we believe in technology, as I said before. So we're not AI-averse at all. What we are averse to is losing those benefits of real connections, and we're exploring ways we can use those tools to improve that connection. That's been the starting point for us — the research a sales team, or really an account-service team, would have to do on a customer, to help them, to empower a cross-sell as well, used to be hours and hours of work. All of a sudden that's the sort of thing that's becoming much simpler and easier. I think the other big use at the moment is, and we're all guilty of it, everybody creates so many documents in a business — financial planning, data, this, that. All of a sudden you have that ability to scan and jump through documents and get the latest piece there. I think that's incredibly useful in any medium to large size business — that's where we're particularly empowering teams at the moment, having that assistant with you doing that research either externally or internally. That's where AI is proving really useful. The big usage we love is that we're a values-led business — we believe in development for employees, we believe in putting that time in and having a clear path. But often what happens is the paperwork — the reviews, collating 360 feedback, and those sorts of things. Again, the brilliance of AI isn't just reading through that and giving you a short summary. It's not about making the task easier and then just trusting that summary, reading off four bullet points rather than doing the work — it's not about that. What it's about is creating a more useful document to work from — a great one-on-one conversation that brings together all the information, that standardizes the development across the business, that uses templates, and helps people with the logistics. The research side has been a big focus. There are a couple of really fascinating things people are only just getting their heads around, like agent-to-agent communication — and let's be clear, I don't think anyone knows where it's going or what's going to happen. You can have a good guess, but it's pretty hard to know how it'll play out. Internally, too — I think soon we're all going to be learning how to write a document so AI can really read it properly, and I think that's going to be a bit of a stumbling block at one point, where the limitations of AI will dictate how we do things. That's going to be a really strange period of time — like all of us shifting to word documents versus presentations, or certain ways of laying out spreadsheets so tools don't get confused. I do think there are a few limitations of AI that we're just going to be stuck with for a number of years, probably. But to answer your last question, how we're bringing it to the forefront — firstly, the main way of helping the customer is creating more time for service and sales agents to speak to a customer. That's the main use of it at the moment, and on top of that, empowering those interactions even faster. So using AI to run through the logistics, and then from a customer point of view, there are certain quick wins, like the chat on the site being smarter. But right now we are not on the edge of AI and really pushing it into everything customer-facing. It really is about trying to reduce the logistics of the paperwork, the research, to get more real time with the customers, because it's a differentiator for me. So that's been the focus.

Bryan Mahoney

I love that, and I think that's really authentic to the brand — how do you use AI internally to give your team superpower, so they can spend more time doing the things that really matter to the customer, and less time doing the things that would hold them back from talking to ten customers in a day because they're doing all that research. More often than not, the people that are really honest about it don't need to just say, 'oh, we're using the latest and greatest.' It's that they're not in a hurry to completely automate the process and cut the humans out of the loop — they want to get even closer to their customers. That's where I'm truly excited about what can happen as we move into this new era and continue to be curious and continue to learn, but never forget what got us here. There are tenets of brand building that are much older than the e-commerce industry, and we keep going back to them — what worked fifty years ago still works today. So as long as we've got humans in the loop, I think there's hope for commerce to continue.

Corin Mills

Yeah, no, exactly. So not anti-AI in the slightest — it's being embraced, but just to help us stay true to our beliefs even more.

Bryan Mahoney

I love that. I think that's a great place to wrap up today's conversation. Corin, thank you so much for joining me today. Really excited to continue to follow along on your journey, and excited to make my next purchase on MOO.

Corin Mills

Oh, great. Thanks — it's been lovely to chat through. Nice to get into this stuff.

Bryan Mahoney

Yeah. Pleasure.