Women of Influence by SheSpeaks
Join us each week on the Women of Influence podcast, hosted by Aliza Freud and presented by SheSpeaks. Each week, Aliza sits down with trailblazing women from various fields—business leaders, social media influencers, authors, speakers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders—who are using their platforms to create meaningful impact. Discover how these women harness their influence to inspire, motivate, and drive change, and gain actionable insights you can apply to your own life!
Women of Influence by SheSpeaks
Behind the Gummies: Strategy, Loyalty & Leadership at OLLY
OLLY's presence in-store is powerful. It's digital strategy? Even more so—and Jennifer Peters is making it all click.
As Director of DTC, Martech, + Digital Compliance at OLLY, Jennifer Peters is helping one of the most recognizable wellness brands deepen its relationship with consumers—both online and off. In this episode, she shares how OLLY is bridging the gap between shelf and screen, redefining loyalty in a retail-first world, and keeping customer empathy at the center of it all.
Jennifer also reflects on her 13 years at Barnes & Noble, how tech is transforming customer feedback into action, and the advice she gives every rising professional looking to build a meaningful, long-term career.
Episode Highlights
- Why DTC is especially challenging for retail-first CPG brands—and how OLLY is making it work.
- What receipt scanning reveals about today’s hybrid shopper.
- Why loyalty means more than points—and who it’s really for.
- What “being where your customer shops” really means in 2025.
- Her advice for building influence and nurturing the next generation of talent.
This episode is packed with practical advice, big-brand insights, and career lessons you’ll actually use.
Links and Resources
Connect with Jennifer Peters on LinkedIn
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Just like being in the room and talking to people, knowing their names, knowing where they work. That will an investment that will last you forever.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the show. Hope you're all having a great week so far. So I am excited for you to hear this episode we have today, because the industry that our guest works in, which is the vitamins and the supplement industry, is an industry that is growing like crazy. Just to give you some stats back in 2022, the global market was estimated for the supplements and vitamins to be about $48 billion. That is growing so quickly. It is expected to reach close to $85 billion by 2030. And that is just enormous increase in awareness about the value of supplements and vitamins.
Speaker 2:And so today we have on the show the wonderful Jennifer Peters, who works at Oli and if you've been to a Target, a Walmart, a Publix or any one of these a CVS you have likely seen the colorful Oli packaging of vitamins and supplements on shelves there. And Jennifer talks to us today about the industry. She talks about her experience and what she has learned along the way. We also take a step back and talk about the beginning of her career, which she spent at Barnes Noble, and we talk about how e-commerce and people buying products online has really evolved over the last several years. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jennifer. I think you will too. We also have some giveaways that we are doing of Ali product. We had the opportunity to get some product from Jennifer and the team at Ali, so look out for some information about how you can enter to win some Ali product. With that, I'm going to let you hear my terrific conversation with Jennifer Peters. Here we go.
Speaker 2:Jennifer welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Well, I have been looking forward to talking with you because you get to work on a brand that I see everywhere now and I need you to first talk to everybody. You are currently the director of direct-to-consumer marketing and tech and digital compliance at OLLI, and you're going to tell us what OLLI is, which I'm sure everyone who hears this is going to know immediately. When you say what OLLI is, what is OLLI?
Speaker 1:I'm sure everyone who hears this is going to know immediately when you say what Oli is. What is Oli? Well, I don't know, because I was at a conference a couple weeks ago and I sat next to two people from Oli, the dog food brand, and we were like, finally we have come together, like everyone can stop confusing us. So it was actually great. So I'm from Oli. We're a gummy supplement company. We have other things besides gummies, but we're known for our gummies that are delightful and yummy. If you don't know what Ollie is, if you've ever been in Target and you walk in and you turn right, we're always on the first end cap, so that is.
Speaker 1:Ollie, you recognize the bottle immediately when you see it.
Speaker 2:All caps, all caps, square bottles, beautiful. So tell us a little bit about what you get to do day to day at Ollie.
Speaker 1:Well, it's different every day, which is why I love it. I run the direct-to-consumer business, including retention, website development, all of the campaign pieces of kind of like running an online business, but I also source and administrate and maintain all of our MarTech systems, so anything that kind of marketing touches or anything that's sort of like in the automation space, anything related to AI that we use for the business. And then I also do compliance, which is great, because usually two different people do those things, and so there's always one person that's like yes, yes, yes, and the other one's like no. So I get to be one person who's like this is a great idea or this is probably a terrible idea. So that's the nature of compliance.
Speaker 2:So I want to dive in a little bit to direct-to-consumer. For those who are listening, who maybe are not as familiar with the direct-to-consumer model, sure.
Speaker 1:The way we define it is truly having a website that sells direct-to-consumer. Like it's not Omnichannel, it's not Amazon, it's not Targetcom, it's purely yourbrandcom, selling direct to your customer. And typically those are the most brand loyal customers that you have Right.
Speaker 2:That's unusual, right, most of the brands that we see day to day. As a shopper, I go into a store. I might see a bottle of shampoo, but I can't go to that bottle of shampoos website and buy the product from there. Maybe I could go on to Amazon and buy it, maybe I can go on to targetcom or walmartcom and buy it, but I can't buy it if I go to their website directly. How did it happen to be that Ali created this?
Speaker 1:sort of dual model? That's a really great question because there is a very good reason. You don't see a lot of CPG brands selling D2C.
Speaker 2:There's a good reason.
Speaker 1:It's very hard and typically your price points are much lower for what you're selling in a retail environment. We are not a digitally native brand. There are a lot of them out there and so their whole business is digital. Ours is still the vast majority brick and mortar in-store sales, so growing a digital business to complement that is really challenging, because it's really hard to connect the customer one-to-one. So, like if somebody shops on onlycom and then they suddenly stop, there's no way really for us to know if they chose a different brand or if they just shop at Walmart now, because now that same product is carried at their local Walmart.
Speaker 1:So, it's really a tough business to unite the customer, but it's also really hard to connect all of those experiences because there's so much that's outside of your control in a brick and mortar environment Like we can't control if the people that work at the Walmart you go to are nice and friendly and helpful.
Speaker 1:Like there's just so many elements of that that are so easy in the digital space but much, much more challenging in brick and mortar and it's really hard to kind of bring that together and make it feel like a unified brand experience.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Did the brand start as a direct-to-consumer brand?
Speaker 1:brand or did it?
Speaker 2:start in a retail location. We started as partners with Target, so our founder also founded Method.
Speaker 1:So same model. Yes, Method the cleaning. So very similar model. We had an innovation partnership with Target. That was everything for several years. But as you grow you need to start serving other retailers and grocery and drug and kind of be in those spaces too. The digital business wasn't a priority until COVID, I would say, when everybody was D2C. You didn't really have much of a choice, Like everybody had to get into the D2C space.
Speaker 1:So I think it really. Anybody who's in that space during COVID realized like this can be a critical part of our business, not just for the selling piece but for the education, just for the presence, the awareness, all of these things. It serves a lot of purposes besides just being a store and while we are a store.
Speaker 2:We also want to be like the brand hub for whichever channel you might be shopping in. Yeah, it's so interesting to hear that in today's day and age, it's still so difficult to match a consumer, a shopper, who buys from you online but then also might buy in store. Even as advanced as we've gotten with the tools and you talked about MarTech, marketing tech earlier Do you have a sense for how these things inform each other? So let's say, I'm walking through a Target or Walmart or whatever and I see Ali there. Do you know if there are instances where I migrate to become a Alicom customer and vice versa? I can see it the other way.
Speaker 2:I start on Alicom and then I migrate to being an in-store customer, but do you know if it goes?
Speaker 1:the other way. I think it really does. I think that when you do have a brandcom website, that's a store, what you bring, there are the people who just really are committed to the brand and really love the brand. I mean, I think Sephora is such a great example of that. Like, sephora has everything beauty, like, let's say, you love Moroccan oil, there's a point where you stop shopping at Sephora and you're like you know what? I want the perks, I want the loyalty points, I want the free gifts.
Speaker 1:I want that from the brand. I'm going to move over to the brand and so I kind of think of it that way, like when you are buying something and you're used to buying it. Like, sephora's got a great loyalty program too, so it's really tough to compete against that, but yeah, they've. There's so many beauty brands now that the benefits of being like a loyalty member there are huge, and that's what drives?
Speaker 1:I think a lot of that, yeah, and so we are investing heavily in our loyalty program as well, and this year we're going to be rolling out receipt scanning so that people who shop in store can also be part of our loyalty program. We don't want to leave out this huge group of customers who love the brand and they don't get the benefits of the loyalty program. They don't get you know news. There's just like a whole CRM opportunity that we're missing to drive people into store. Like we don't. We don't want to move people from channel to channel. We want to be there to support whatever channel they want to be in, and so this will help us understand where they are much better.
Speaker 2:I love that. What a great idea to be able to do that. So we now understand a little bit more about what you get to do day to day at OLLI. I want to take a little bit of a step back, if we can, and talk about where you started in your career.
Speaker 1:You started on the retail side at Barnes Noble.
Speaker 2:I love going into a Barnes Noble.
Speaker 1:I do too. I do. I just love touching the books. I love the smell. The smell I was going to say the smell of the books, it's just there's a different experience.
Speaker 2:Of course, we all buy a lot of stuff online. We do that's. You know that's where Amazon started, in books, Absolutely. But there is something about that experience of walking into a Barnes Noble that you just can't get. Yeah, and it is that experiential moment. So I want to talk about how you went from Barnes Noble on the retail side to making the shift to digital media and what you learned at Barnes Noble that you think taught you how to do what you get to do today.
Speaker 1:It's such a great question because I feel like in a lot of ways and I have other people that I've worked with at Barnes Noble over the years who kind of moved on to other things like we feel like we were raised by Barnes Noble. I was there for 13 years. I grew up in their management program, which is like huge investments in people. I mean, when you're in that space, you're just people managing in a lot of ways. So I got the opportunity to really learn that young, which I think once I moved over to the digital space, you kind of see like individual contributors they're good at their job and then they get promoted to manager and they have no idea what to do.
Speaker 1:I was very lucky to grow up in the environment at Barnes Noble where management and good people management was like the most important thing. But I was there for a long time and I think everything that you know about merchandising and customer service and checkout, all of that stuff is exactly the same. It's just in a different space. Like you still want the customer to get to what they want as fast as possible, you want to put it in their hand, you want to get them to the register and you want them to check out Like it's exactly the same.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have a promotion.
Speaker 1:It's the same thing as having an end cap Like it's not different. So I was really lucky to have many years of a foundation of understanding how to sell stuff to people and people who wanted to be there. I always felt like Barnes Noble customers chose to be there. They love it there. It's not the grocery store where you have to go. It's truly a place that you choose to be and I got really lucky and pivoted out of that because my ex-husband was in the Army and he got stationed at.
Speaker 1:Fort Campbell in Kentucky and I applied for a role at the United Methodist Publishing House and I became their director of e-commerce for their church supply business, and it was basically because the person there filling the role felt like, well, you know how to run a bookstore. It's just a bookstore online. It's the same thing and it is honestly. It sounds like silly, but it is kind of the same thing and it is honestly. It sounds like silly but it is kind of the same thing.
Speaker 1:When I first came to Cokesbury which was the name of it they were only doing print catalogs and print mailers and there was zero digital, and so it was super cool to be able to build that entire program from the ground up, like, and I also didn't know anything, so I had to learn everything, but I was able to do it at a pace where I could learn it and implement it and you, where I could learn it and implement it and you know kind of test and measure and test and measure and by the time I left we had a team of like, I think, 10 people all running on the digital space.
Speaker 2:It was really cool. Well, and I have to tell you it's interesting because I'm thinking about how what you must have been exposed to in working at Barnes Noble and understanding the customer. I started my career at American Express. We had a call center. We got this enormous amount of feedback, thousands and thousands of people who answered the phones.
Speaker 2:And I remember the best piece of advice I got early in my marketing career at American Express was the best investment I will make in understanding the customer is. Sitting with the customer service reps and doing what they call parallels. Where a parallel like you listened in on the calls, you understood what the customer was saying. I can't tell you how valuable that was in my understanding of marketing. Yeah, talking about a promotion, right, we would launch promotions and the customer service reps wouldn't even know about them. And that was one of the first things that I was able to figure out by sitting on a call with one of these reps, because somebody called in and said oh, I got this thing, you sent me in the mail.
Speaker 1:I'm like what.
Speaker 2:Tell me more switch in your brain that goes off when you start to understand that there is a person that is real user, whether the person is on digital or they're in person. They are going through some sort of experience to purchase and to become and to be an ongoing customer. I feel like the retail experience is unparalleled.
Speaker 1:It really is. I like to think of it as seeing a movie that's based on a book. You can see the movie and you can be like this is a great movie. I really enjoyed this movie, yeah. But if you've read the book, there's always someone who's like well, I read the book and there's a lot more in the book, like there's a lot more context and there's a lot more story, and I feel like that's what you get when Figure it out from watching the movie. You'll get there. It's fine, but it sure is easier when you have all of the context and the experience.
Speaker 2:I bet you that it's so second nature to you at this point, after spending 13 years that you don't even like realize how much it informs everything you're doing on a customer journey.
Speaker 1:That's a digital customer journey. Yeah, that's so true, and a lot of the younger people that I work with they don't have that experience, and so I don't know that I ever really valued it as much as I probably do now.
Speaker 2:So you have this expertise in online sales and very strong knowledge about the direct-to-consumer selling, including things like Shopify, magento. What are some of the insights that people should understand about selling to consumers online?
Speaker 1:Gosh you just always have to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Even I can forget it sometimes, and that's my North Star. If you get to a place where you're thinking about operations, you're thinking about supply, at the end of the day, you have to act like you've never seen your website before, ever open it up and experience the site like a customer. You don't want to let a lot of it bias you in ways that are not good but at the same time, that customer empathy is always the most important thing, and I think in the CPG space it's really easy to start thinking of like Walmart and Target and Publix and HEB as your customers. They're not. They are customers.
Speaker 1:But the end user is the one who feels delight when they use your product. They're the ones who are going to come back and buy it again. They're the ones that are going to talk to their friends about the brand. Those are the people that matter. Obviously, walmart matters, but I think that's one of the most challenging things is to get everyone in the organization to realize who the customer is. It sounds simple, but it's really not.
Speaker 2:No, but as somebody who spent a lot of years at a company, that when we said customer and card member, we were talking about the person who used their American Express card. It was such a shift in thinking for me when I started working with people who had to make sure that they drove volume at a retail location that when they said customer, they were talking about the retailer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, they were talking about it's very different.
Speaker 2:Because to them, they're moving all this product to their shelves, right? So if you're Pampers, your customer is ultimately the retail location and you want them to be happy. Yes, that's whose happiness matters, that's who's great, it's so true and it's just, it's such a different way of thinking, and so I guess my question for you is how do you, as someone who understands the value of the consumer so let's say the shopper, the person who's buying the product but also the value of the retailer, how do you think about balancing those constituencies? It's tough.
Speaker 1:It's tough and in organizations everybody has a different role too. There's a shopper marketer whose role is purely to serve the retail customer. It's you know. There's customer experience team. They're there to help individual people with the things that go wrong. So I think those are like the two extremes to me, and we've got to find a way to integrate all of that and kind of bring it into the middle. I mean it's obviously important to make sure that your retailers feel supported. Right it into the middle. I mean it's obviously important to make sure that your retailers feel supported.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of levers you can pull to make that happen. It's really almost like a level of influence, I think, in the way you talk internally, the way you talk about customers, the way you talk to your operations department, your supply chain and the people who order boxes and the pick and packers in your warehouse. Everybody needs to understand customer the same way. So it's not something you can do overnight, especially if you're trying to overcome previous cultural beliefs about who the customer is. You just constantly have to talk about it that way, and in the business the customer experience should be one of the most important people on the team because they are the ones who know exactly what's wrong and exactly what's right. And it's really easy to dismiss that stuff as anecdotal, but it's real like from actual people.
Speaker 1:Yes so it's a trove of information.
Speaker 1:It really is it is, and sometimes it's things you don't want to hear. We actually use a tool and it takes all the sentiment from the whole internet and puts it in a dashboard by product. And it has been one of the best things because, all of a sudden, all of the complaints that we've had over the years about like well, this one package is really hard to open, we'll say nothing happened for years. Suddenly it's a data point and it's not anecdotal information Like when you put it in a dashboard. It's a data point. Oh my God, it's genius.
Speaker 2:It is. You can't argue with it, you can't ignore it.
Speaker 1:You can't hide from it.
Speaker 2:And it is OK that because I do think that that's one of the difficult parts of working at a big company is that everyone assumes that something's anecdotal and until you can funnel the anecdotes into something quantitative and predictive. It is so difficult to get people to pay attention. It really is so I love that there is this tool.
Speaker 1:It's a great tool. It really is. It's a that there is this tool. It's a great tool.
Speaker 2:It really is.
Speaker 1:It's a game changer for us. I think there's so many things you don't want to have to deal with, you don't want to have to face. I guarantee you there's not a single thing that comes up there that our team didn't already know, right? I mean, there are literally zero surprises, right? But this gives you a way to quantify Exactly. Now we can talk about it as if it's data. Yes, and that is a game changer.
Speaker 2:I love that All right. When you think about the retail partners that we talked about, the paid media channels that are out there, what do you think is the biggest challenge in kind of maintaining that cohesive channel strategy when you have so many different elements?
Speaker 1:elements. My feeling is that the most important thing is to build your internal structure in a way that supports kind of all ships rising. Because if you create an environment where you have channels competing against each other and feeling like you're getting in my channel, like I want to steal your customer because I need to make my numbers, it creates this environment where you forget that you're on the same team and we are so lucky at OLLI to have an understanding that everything has kind of like an aura effect. When we win, we all win. We don't win for each individual channel's number. Yeah, and I have worked many places and seen many companies that have a different structure than that, where it truly is very competitive, where you have your sales team being so angry that Walmartcom did a sale and Target didn't get. You know.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's so easy to kind of create this us versus them mentality and that structure comes from the top. It has to be intentional and it has to be strategic and you have to think about the brand as a whole and not the brand as it breaks down in a channel.
Speaker 2:It's the concept of the rising tide floating all boats Absolutely, and to get a team to understand that is not a small feat.
Speaker 1:No, it's not, and everyone has to buy into that. Every person on your leadership team has to buy into that in order for it to work.
Speaker 2:If someone who is listening does not have that naturally in their organization, is there anything you can recommend or advice you have for them about how they could create that?
Speaker 1:cohesiveness. It comes to how you talk about it, and I really think a lot of times, when you're in an organization and let's say you're not a VP, you're not a manager or whatever, there are certain things that you can influence but you can't do A lot of it is almost campaigning, like you go out there, you say the same words, you talk to the people who you know are decision makers, you tell them the same stories and sometimes you have to say it multiple times to the same person before it clicks before they get it.
Speaker 1:So it's almost just like an Oscar campaign. You go out and you just start kind of, you know, talking about this as if it's something very important. Every opportunity you get to kind of speak widely to people within your company, you've got to talk about it and you've got to build alliances internally.
Speaker 1:And that sounds weird and not sneaky, but obviously you shouldn't have to do that. But that is the reality. Right, you've got to figure out who's a doer. Who can you get on your side and like what executive sponsorship can you get around this idea? Build who can you get on your side and like what executive sponsorship can you get around this idea? Build yourself a network of allies within your business. There are always going to be people who are helpers and there are always going to be people who are not.
Speaker 1:And you just have to find the ones who are, Find the helpers. You've got to find the helpers and they. If you can get them on your team, you can make that happen.
Speaker 2:Or at least you can improve it significantly. Oh, that happen, or at least you can improve it significantly. Yeah, oh my God. I love that when you think about how many times we say we have to expose a consumer to a message until they kind of go oh, I'm going to buy this.
Speaker 1:It's not once, it's not twice. There's always a frequency, there is a frequency to?
Speaker 2:how often do you have to expose them to it?
Speaker 1:Okay, Well since we are on a podcast that is called Women of Influence, tell me how do you think about influence, what does it mean to you? Where it really feels to me like I'm in the place, where I want to give back now, and there's always kind of this reckoning of you know, looking to your past, looking at who your mentors were, looking at what they taught you. Sometimes they taught you what not to do.
Speaker 2:In a lot of cases, yes, which is a valuable lesson too.
Speaker 1:Some of the hardest things to learn are watching bad managers do bad management. But you sure can learn a lot oh yes, and I'm at that. Oh yes, around women, helping women is very different than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago. There's just a solid network of women's groups. Like she speaks, I mean, there's so many places out there where women can support each other and I think it's really important to influence that next generation of person, of manager, of employee, of person who cares about the brand. So that's really where I am right now. And my middle son just graduated from high school. He's in his first year of college right now and he had this friend group of just like the most brilliant kids I've ever seen. I mean, they're just amazing. And you know, there's this one in particular who's just like wants to know everything about what everybody at OLLI does, because she wants to know it, I mean she's very smart, but you know I mean just like to see that, like voracious appetite for information and learning, and like that's so exciting to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to see someone just like you know this, I know she's going to go out there and kill it in this business world Like she's going to be great. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's being able to influence that next generation, I think is of that same age, and seeing that the kids that really do stand out are the ones who have a thirst for information and are curious. And it's interesting because if I were to tell that generation one thing, it would be look, when you're starting out, you're low on skill, but what do you have? You have high will, Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And take your will and really dial it up, and that means being curious. Ask the questions, do as much as you can to show that this is because you can be that sponge.
Speaker 1:You can, absolutely. You might find something you really love at a business you already work in that you never thought you'd be interested in, and when I hire, that's what I look for. I don't. I can teach you how to be a Shopify developer, but I can't teach you how to be curious and passionate and ambitious and smart. I mean, those are things that you come to the table with, or you don't?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, and maybe this question, my last question for you, sort of dovetails so much with that, but I always love ending and asking my guests to talk about, if they could go back to when they were just getting started, what one piece of advice they would give their younger selves.
Speaker 1:Make friends with everybody that you can in the business that you're in, because it's all the same people, Right? I mean, I think the longer I'm in the Bay Area, the longer I'm in CPG, the longer I'm in e-commerce. It is literally all the same people working at different places. They just move around. Yeah, and those relationships are everything. Yeah, it's if you go into a room and you network and you don't talk to anybody, you just left who knows what on the table. Yeah, those relationships are everything. And I take some of my direct reports to events so they can meet people and you know, I mean just like being in the room and talking to people, knowing their names, knowing where they work. That will an investment that will last you forever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love that. What a great, what a great piece of advice. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer, for spending this time with us today.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me. This was so great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is fun. Thanks for doing it.
