[00:00:12] Alicia Esposito: Welcome back everyone to Step by Step. I'm Alicia Esposito and this is episode two of the Capital of Commerce, our series on how modern brands are optimizing cash flow in 2025 for a successful 2026. In our last episode, we discussed theCommplexities of managing global supplier networks, the challenges of tariffs, currency management and payment flexibility as your brand grows and expands across borders. We explored how brands like yours can build financial resilience into their sourcing strategies with the right tools and tech partnerships. But as you likely know, sourcing is only half the equation. Today, we're turning our attention to the demand side. The rapidly changing world of when and why people buy and how your brand can seize the next cultural moment. This episode is called seizing the seasonal opportunity and it's all about navigating the new retail calendar or rather the lack of one. And increasingly the biggest sales moments aren't planned at all. They're sparked by a TikTok trend, a native celebrity endorsement, or a product that went viral overnight just because an influencer was using it. For this episode, I'm sitting down with Nicole Thomas of Brex and Anand Mehta of Melio to discuss how these shifts are impacting inventory planning, marketing strategy, and most importantly, cash flow. We'll talk about the financial strain that comes with an unpredictable demand spike and how seasonal brands can thrive despiteCommpressed and sporadic selling windows. What it really takes to build that kind of financial agility that lets you jump on all of these moments, cultural or seasonal without straining your business. Whether you're already seasonal by nature, like a swimwear or patio furniture retailer, or you're just trying to keep up with the chaos of modern commerce. This episode is gonna give you a framework for matching your cash flow and your financial operations to these new growth opportunities. Let's get into it.

[00:02:30] Alicia Esposito: So today I have two experts on the line with me, and we're gonna be digging into the new contexts driving commerce and how the rise of TikTok and other platforms for inspiration and ideation are really changing things up for merchants and what that really means from an operational standpoint. I want to welcome my guests today and kick things off by having you both share a little bit about yourself.

[00:02:59] Nicole Thomas: Great, thanks so much. I'm Nicole Thomas, I'm the Head of Partner Marketing at Brex and I have been in commerce in a few different ways over the years. So I was on the platform side, I've worked on the brand side, on PR. And now at Brex, I am working with a lot of our eCommmerce partners to make sure that brands have the cash on hand that they need and able to manage all of their demand and their cash flow. So super excited to be here with you.

[00:03:32] Anand Mehta: Hey, thanks for having me. Anand Mehta from Melio. I'm on our strategic partnerships team. Melio is a small and medium business tailored B2B payments platform. We work with a lot of eComm businesses, both in our direct channel and also with close partners like Shopify, which I lead on our side.

[00:03:52] Alicia Esposito: Excellent. Well, I kind of alluded to the core of our conversation today at the introduction, but it bears repeating that the traditional sales calendar has really been turned on its head. And at FutureCommmerce, we believe that it really connects to the psychology behind how we buy and when we buy, right? Like there are so many sources of inspiration and whether it's culture, social media, other sources, we are inspired and we can act in that moment. So to kick things off, Nicole, I would love for you to share your thoughts on what is really driving the most disruption when we think about seasonality. How is this changing calendar really impacting the way merchants go market today? And how is that kind of going into product design, inventory planning, marketing, like all of these factors because they are truly connected, right? I mean, what forces are really top of mind for you?

[00:05:00] Nicole Thomas: Yeah, so when we look at the retail calendar or at least as it stood about five years ago, I think like right around like when COVID hit, it used to be fairly predictable. So you had Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then going into like back to school, maybe a Valentine's Day here and there, depending on what business you're in. And I think, in the last, I would say two or three years, we've seen a huge cultural shift from the predictability of these peaks and valleys of buyer cycles and consumer behavior to now we're seeing kind of a shift of these spikes happening a lot more often. And so with the introduction of TikTok and with even ChatGPT or Prime Day or an Apple release, for example, a lot of those spikes are becoming a little less predictable. And so seasonality is kind of taking shape in the way that it's less of like these ebbs and flows maybe twice a year to maybe once a month. If your product goes viral or if a celebrity endorses something or if they're seen with something, especially in the health consumer purchasing type space, like with clothing, things like that, we see a lot of these spikes become a little bit more on the culture and your consumers are now expecting to get those products in the color or in the SKU that they want when they want it.

[00:06:27] Nicole Thomas: And you need to be prepared for that. So it's increasingly difficult to make sure that as a brand, you're staying relevant and you're also being able to keep up with inventory and making sure that your marketing teams, your finance teams, the product teams are all able to keep up with these more increasingly difficult seasons to track versus kind of the traditional calendar. So, the main two things that we see with brands that we work with is inventory management and marketing management. And those, especially around spend, those can be very inversely related in terms of like their seasonalities of when that spend happens. And so it is becoming an increasingly big topic for brands to start thinking about and you can't really ignore it anymore with how the consumer behavior is shaping up.

[00:07:20] Alicia Esposito: Yeah. I like that you call out those two possible paths, right? Because on one hand, there is a moment where the brand is the star, right? Like a product goes viral or a celebrity is using or wearing their product and that drives an uptick in demand directly connected to the brand itself. But then there are the external cultural moments that become an opportunity for a brand to kind of latch itself onto or co create or be a part of the conversation. So on both sides, that does require agility, flexibility, and also access to the capital required to make those investments in order to seize the moment, so to speak. So the follow-up to that is that has very significant trickle down effects to the financial side of the business, right? So I would love to kind of break down those ripple effects and how that impacts access to capital and cash flow. And if there are any like moments of tension or challenges that arise there.

[00:08:34] Anand Mehta: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think Nicole is spot on and although maybe a specific brand has maybe one team working on marketing, one team working on inventory, someone else working on financial management, at the end of the day, these things are all connected. Your marketing strategy will kind of dictate how inventory management happens, you know, how kind of well that happens, and then that will determine kind of the cash flow and financial position. So in terms of inventory, Nicole's point, you know, peaks and valleys where in the past maybe they're more predictable. You know, we've got two peaks in the year, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and maybe something before summer, and the rest is valleys. Um, whereas now the peaks and valleys are kind of much more frequent and unexpected in a lot of ways. It's easy to potentially get caught either in, let's say, a stock out at the peak, right, where, hey, this is great. I'm glad that this is taking off, but, oh, shoot, you know, I might miss sales because I actually don't have the inventory on hand. Or on the other side, which is just as bad of overstocking, you know, during a valley, let's say you have too much cash tied up in stock and you're not able to move that.

[00:09:56] Anand Mehta: So absolutely, you know, it ripples down to inventory and to cash at the end of the day. And so I think there's a lot of thinking that brands, you know, should do and are starting to do about how do I manage inventory? How do I connect it to my marketing calendar as I'm trying to navigate these new peaks and valleys? And even how do we look at my SKUs? Right? Like trying to sell all products all year equally will put a lot of strain on your inventory management. So how should I adjust my mental models? You know, maybe looking at which 20% of my SKUs are driving 80% of my revenue and focus there, or which of my SKUs are more consistent selling all year versus which are prone to volatility and kind of planning inventory management that way become these new challenges and focus areas rippling down from the peaks and valleys.

[00:10:58] Nicole Thomas: Yeah. And I think too, when you look at both inventory and marketing spend with the cash flow kind of coming in and out and a lot of brands needing to float their way through a lot of those values of sales where, hey, maybe you need to front load a lot of your inventory and then you're spending marketing later in the year, this all impacts financial processes and how the financial team plans. And what we've seen a lot is a lot of these brand teams, depending like if you're a two person brand that's just getting started all the way up through enterprise, a lot of theseCommpanies are a lot of their headcount is related to the marketing and the product side. And so, when you have one or two people in finance or you have outsourced financing or a fractional CFO, or you're relying on a PE firm, a lot of these decisions are a little bit lifted away from those teams. And so, when you have lack of visibility into when these peaks or valleys are happening or when these spikes demand are happening with virality, especially, can't really go back to your financing and say, Hey, completely redo the model for the year because you're overlaying the new seasonality on top of the traditional seasonal calendar.

[00:12:15] Nicole Thomas: So, when you have these viral spikes, you already have a finance planning model where you may not make that money back until the end of the year traditionally, but like say you have a big spike and then you have a lot of cash flow that's happening at once. Like a lot of these teams are now scrambling and finance is trying to keep up with what marketing and what product is doing to make sure that that cash flow is being managed properly. So we're seeing a lot of strain on these teams to make sure that when you need to pivot and be more agile within this new market, they don't have the cash on hand or they have too much and they need to figure out how to plan that. So, we're seeing a lot of brands come to us or I've worked with them in the past where working capital becomes really apparent and really important for these brands to be able to get through some of these peaks and valleys, especially when you're operating at such a tight margin between cost of goods sold and your revenue.

[00:13:10] Alicia Esposito: Got it, so interesting. So what are the next steps? So of course, like we are really unpacking the new realities, the tensions that are existing within many merchant organizations because to your point, Nicole, there are the baseline insights around performance, how products typically sell, but then like those pops that are driven by culture, by social media, by viral moments, like those aren't consistent, right? So those can happen at any time or they can not happen at any time like year over year or even month over month, week over week. So what is the answer? Like how do you ensure you have cash on hand to seize opportunities or be able to be a bit more agile in terms of allocated towards inventory and marketing? So those constraints, I guess is the right word, don't happen and you can seize the moment.

[00:14:17] Nicole Thomas: Yeah. So looking at the financial landscape of a lot of these brands, I think it depends on their use case cause every brand is different. Every product, I guess, segment is different too. So like, if you're looking at a traditionally seasonal brand that already kind of knows when their peaks and valleys are gonna hit, they probably have a pretty good financial model of when that cash flow is gonna happen. But when you're thinking about all of these quick hits where they have two weeks to turn around a new ad campaign, it not only hits like your ad spend, but it also hits like if you need to bring in a brand designer or additional headcount in to be able to actually produce some of this marketing support, or if you need to bring in another factory to say Pinterest color of the year is red, but, oh crap, I don't have any skews. I'm only doing yellow and black. I don't know. So when you have to look at both inventory and on the marketing side with not only things that are going viral as a product on TikTok, but also just like general trends in the market. So like, I don't know if like Gen Z drinking is way down until a lot of these brands that are doing a lot of like non alcoholic drinks or different alternatives to that or wellness brands.

[00:15:37] Nicole Thomas: When you see just kind of like a general lift in your brand spend, you probably won't see that cash flow come back until later. And so what I've traditionally seen in my previous job at BigCommerce was a lot of companies were taking out working capital loans, which in the traditional sense can be in a few different things. So you can take out a working capital loan through a provider that gives you pretty decent terms and you spread it out over six to twelve to thirty two months, just kind of depending on what terms you want, or people are putting it on, I've seen people put it on their personal card or they have to ask their family for money if it's a growing business, or you have to go back to your PE or VC firm and be like, Hey, we need more money to do this. And typically that's seen as a gamble or a little bit risky. And so what we've tried to start kind of shifting the narrative to is like, how do you get that working capital without having it be a long term loan? Where like when you start layering all of these different peaks and valleys that are new onto an already existing model where say you're used to having inventory spike in the summer, preparing for Black Friday, you spend all your marketing spend on Black Friday around the holiday period, and then you make all your revenue back by the end of the year.

[00:16:58] Nicole Thomas: So you have a traditional calendar year. But when you layer on all these other spikes, if you're paying out those loans and you're taking those out kind of on like a quick basis and they're starting to layer, it's really, really hard, especially for teams that don't have that finance team to have visibility to like where your cash is actually sitting, what's owed, what is coming up. And so it is hard to make sure that you have the cash on hand until you're not having to take out loans. Kind of personal, if you like know that something's going on sale, but your paycheck hasn't hit next month, you can't be putting that on your credit card, um, and compounding that interest. And so, um, the shift to using credit cards to your advantage and getting float is gonna be really, really important as brands continue to grow and scale.

[00:17:46] Alicia Esposito: And then are there any notable distinctions we should call out for the businesses that have innately seasonal offerings? Like I'm thinking swimsuit brands, patio furniture maybe, even like air conditioners, right? Like there are certain periods that are peak selling. Are there any nuances to call out there around cash flow and financial planning?

[00:18:17] Nicole Thomas: From what I see, I think there's like three different buckets of how brands need to think about seasonality. So one being these traditionally seasonal brands like ski wear or swimsuits or patio furniture, or even like certain food products that are really popular in the summer, only in the winter. That is one. And then I think there's another bucket to think about where kind of on the opposite side of the spectrum, where it's probably a traditionally pretty level set brand across the board, they sell consistently throughout the year. A good example I like to use for this is Stanley. So Stanley, you can use it in the summer, you can use it to keep things hot in the winter, cool in the summer, but for whatever reason it got picked up on TikTok and now everyone's using this product, they then had to really, really quickly shift a lot of that kind of flat seasonal spend planning. And then the third bucket being companies that are traditionally seasonal, they see maybe a spike for the holidays, maybe a spike for, I don't know, Memorial Day, but then their products, especially if it's like skincare or things that people buy on a regular basis that don't typically go on sale, but you're starting to see like Prime Day or these like random sales pop up that may not necessarily be your company driving that. And it's actually the consumer driving the demand for that product. Those are kind of the three buckets. And so the financial implications are pretty similar across the board where you still need cash on hand, but with the products that have these more viral spikes throughout the year, I think those are gonna be the businesses to look at where that's gonna be probably the most touchy in terms of needing cash on hand or needing to move things around quicker. And so being able to make sure that you're switching manufacturers, kind of the same thing with making sure that you can move vendors and move your money around when needed.

[00:20:25] Anand Mehta: Yeah. And across all three buckets, I think data is an eCommmerce brand's best friend. Data, data, data will allow you to be proactive and not reactive regardless of which of those three buckets fall into, as Nicole mentioned. And I think one great data point or great metric for eCommmerce brands to kind of think about is their cash conversion cycle. And for any listeners that don't know what that is, basically, that's a metric that's made up of three simple parts. DIO, which is days inventory outstanding, DSO, which is days sales outstanding, and then DPO, which is days payable outstanding. And basically, the formula is quite simple. It's DIO, so the inventory outstanding, plus days sales outstanding minus days payable outstanding. And I guess in other words or in simpler words, what that means is, hey, how long do I hold my inventory until I can sell it? When I sell it, how long does that turn into cash that I physically have in my hand or bank account? And then how long can I hold that cash before I actually have to send it out to my suppliers for that inventory? And the goal here is for that number, that output to be as low as possible. Low as possible meaning, I convert inventory to cash and then can wait as long as possible to send it out, right? And so, you know, there are a lot of brands out there to look up to that are really great at this. You know, one example I always like to look at is Costco. You know, Costco have managed to have like a very low, if not negative cash conversion cycle because, you know, their store is the warehouse, right? So the inventory is right there.

[00:22:17] Anand Mehta: There's not time in between with shipping and things like that. People buy it, you know, and they check out at the store, so it turns to cash pretty immediately. And then they have great net terms set up with their suppliers where they don't have to pay them back for 30 days, sixty days. So they've already sold and converted their inventory to cash before they even have to pay it out. And so for an eCommmerce brand sitting there and looking at these three pieces, there's different levers and we've talked about a few of them already with inventory that any brand can take to try to improve each of these elements and ideally multiple of the elements. For inventory, we talked a lot about some of the inventory management strategies. I think for sales, a bit better for eCommmerce just given that people are paying online at checkout. Really, the DSO here is kind of how long it takes for the payouts from your payment processor to come through. But, you know, maybe if a brand doing wholesale or B2B, you may do invoicing, but let's kind of just go with the payout. The days payable outstanding and paying suppliers, I think that's one of the most overlooked elements of the three. You know, let's call it the youngest child of the three children. You know, I think everyone thinks a lot about sales and their inventory, but paying suppliers is kind of just that thing you have to do.

[00:23:43] Anand Mehta: But there's a lot of opportunity there actually to optimize that one piece of your cash conversion cycle. Know, one of them, as we mentioned, is based on your relationships with your suppliers kind of getting net terms, you know, whether that's net 30 or anything you can get, that itself will kind of allow you to extend that payment out to suppliers as long as possible so you can try to sell that inventory and turn it into cash. But there are other, you know, under the radar ways too, which, you know, we think are and we've seen kind of be a big boon to ecommerce brands. For example, like using your credit card, your business credit card to pay your suppliers and vendors. And there's a number of kind of different tools and ways you can do that even to pay suppliers who don't traditionally accept card. And, you know, in the B2B space, it's not as typical as it is me and you walking around with our credit cards, you know, going to Starbucks for a card to be accepted. You know, even if you look at ad spend, right, a lot of spend obviously is going to Meta Ads, to Google Ads. These guys have started to kind of cut back on accepting cards these days. And so you kind of losing a bit of that chance to get that extra float. So there are definitely ways to address this. I think looking at the days payable outstanding, know, offer some great opportunities that maybe eCommmerce brands haven't considered in the past.

[00:25:13] Alicia Esposito: Super helpful. And I love Costco as an example. I love Costco at Future Commmerce. But of course, not every brand is quite there yet. Maybe they aspire to get to that level or at least maybe sell through Costco. So I guess the big question as we get into takeaways and our closeout is what needs to be done from an operational standpoint, like teams, skills, functions, but also like the technology side too. Like you mentioned credit and the opportunities there. Like are there any key takeaways from best in class brands? Like any partners that you've worked with that we can really distill and maybe turn into a playbook of sorts for the folks listening to this conversation? Nicole, do you wanna start?

[00:26:09] Nicole Thomas: Yeah, so a lot of brands, I think especially smaller or like newer brands that are looking to scale and grow, I think there's a little bit of a decision paralysis when you're looking at like your tech stack, who you need to hire, where is that cashflow going because you're trying to grow. So you kind of think off the top of your head, oh, I'm just gonna focus on inventory and marketing and all the good stuff that we've already talked about today. But the thing that we like to recommend and like as having worked on the brand side myself, something that we didn't think about was like, okay, we're trying to scale and grow this really fast, but we're not putting in the infrastructure in place to really make that happen. And a lot of the brands that I've talked to recently since being at Brex is how they even get capital. And so I've talked to brands that are VC or PE backed, they are still struggling with some of this as well, especially ones that are not, is trying to get credit lines. So even if you know that you need a cash flow, you're getting this big spike that is eventually gonna hit and you're going viral. A lot of banks will not look at virality as a sense of collateral. So, you're trying to get these bank loans, underwriting is not an easy process. It's hard to get approved, honestly. And a lot of the working capital companies that I've worked with in the past, they also had a hard time underwriting because of just kind of traditional banks and how they approve you.

[00:27:38] Nicole Thomas: So if you don't have any personal collateral that you can put up or you don't have a lot of, I guess, background in how much revenue that your company has made, especially for newer brands. You just don't get a business credit card. So you have to put it a lot on your personal or you're putting up your house as collateral for a business, which is not ideal. And I think most people would try to avoid that. And so something that we really pride ourselves on with Brax, we actually were founded by two guys that couldn't get working capital because they were based in Brazil. And so they were trying to start a business in The US. And so when they went to get cash for a startup, they actually were like, Hey, we can't get any capital. We can't get any credit limit. So, why don't we kind of start taking a look at maybe making a better version of a bank? And so, that's how Brex was actually born. And we see this a lot with eComm brands and why we're so excited about working with eComm brands is our underwriting is just based off of real time business health. And so we can increase and change your limit based off of how much revenue that you're creating or kind of what those conversion rates are that Anand mentioned. And so that's one thing. So getting flexible credit lines that are large, having the ability to put things on a credit card, A, makes it quicker.

[00:29:08] Nicole Thomas: So you're able to kind of turn some of these expenses quicker, gives you more visibility and also allows you to have float. So instead of having a traditional bank loan where you're again, spreading it out over twelve months, but you really only need it for like two weeks of kind of a cash conversion cycle, it just makes it a little bit easier. So with the ability to push that out maybe a month, maybe two months with a card like Brex, there's obviously a lot of different corporate cards that you can get. But I think the biggest thing is just making sure that A, you can get flow, you can get more limit if you need it quickly. And then kind of the ability to have visibility into where all of your spend is coming from. So when you have marketing teams that are spending, you have product teams that are spending, A lot of that tends to be disjointed, which is why we actually now work with Melio is making sure that the marketing team is just as financially literate as the finance team. And so is the product team, because all of everything at the end of the day, business is about making money so you can keep serving your customers. So making sure that everyone has visibility and you can track budgets and move things quickly versus trying to go through ACH or loans or paying your vendors, which is why we work with Melio. I'll pass it over to Anand to talk a little bit about vendor payment.

[00:30:31] Anand Mehta: {Laughter} Yeah, no, absolutely. We like to say that, you know, an eCommmerce business or really any business has two jobs: find customers and close customers. Everything else should be geared towards that. I think what we're inspired by Emilio and why we love working with Brex is we want to be tools that help these businesses and these brands be able to focus on that and not focus on all of the things in the back office and worrying about do I have cash to even go find customers and go close customers. So I 100% agree, Nicole, with you there. I think in terms of how businesses can kind of look for the right ways to address some of these things, looking at the cash conversion cycle and saying, Okay, what kind of tools can help me with inventory management as we've talked about? And there's a lot of great ones out there from accounting softwares like Xero to tools within a company like Shopify, if that's where you manage your eCommmerce business, they have some good inventory management tools or like apps like Stocky. And then on the supplier side and the payment side, as Nicole has been mentioning, tools like Melio, we purposefully built our tool in a way that allows these eCommmerce brands to use their credit cards even where a card is not accepted, right? So open up a whole you know, portfolio of supplier payments that you can now put on card, extend by thirty or more days the time you can hold on to that cash.

[00:32:14] Anand Mehta: And so that's a big priority for us, we've seen a lot of great success stories together with Brex for eCommmerce brands who are taking advantage of this. And by the way, think one important thing to say on this, and we hear this from customers sometimes, it's a common misconception that this use case of extending cash flow is just for businesses who are struggling with cash flow. It's not. You know, if you're a brand that is very liquid, you know, you're not worrying about cash flow day to day to survive or to be able to order inventory, it doesn't mean that this can't have a massive, massive impact on your liquidity. As Nicole said earlier, you know, at the top of the episode, with peaks becoming more unexpected, having that cash buffer allows you to adapt. Uh, it allows you to be a brand that's jumping in on a trend in the early stages of the trend, not chasing a trend. And that makes a huge, huge difference, you know, when you're seeing these pops, how early or late you are. And so liquidity for medium sized big brands is just as impactful as it is for a small brand, uh, who's trying to kind of keep their business going and growing. So applies to all. And we think it's a really powerful way and we've seen a lot of great success in working with Brex and with eCommmerce brands that are leveraging kind of BrexCars and Melio tool together.

[00:33:39] Alicia Esposito: Yeah. I really like that distinction, Anand. Like there's a clear difference. Like we can see it as consumers between the brands that are on the leading edge or like right next to a trend versus like scrambling behind and just like trying to get a piece of the pie, so to speak. So I think being able to have that speed and that ability to take control of the opportunity regardless of the group or function that you're in, or marketing, that's profound power. That's big opportunity, I think even, or I guess I should say, especially for thoseCommpanies that are mid tier or even small business and they're looking to grow and reach new customers and expand their customer base. But to close out our conversation, I want us to kind of look into our crystal balls a little bit because we're talking about this idea of seasonality, possibly challenging it a little bit, defining it in a new way. I'm curious, what do you guys think about this idea of seasonality in retail? Like, will it matter as much in five years or do you think we're gonna be leaning into the undertones of this conversation, which is more so a continuous cycle of inspiration. That's driven by culture, community, and that commerce will really be the connecting point to all of that? Like, are we gonna be a more culture led sales cycle or seasonality still going to be playing a role? I know it's a big question. So I'll leave it to you guys to decide who goes first.

[00:35:31] Nicole Thomas: I'll answer this very shortly. I think you hit the nail on the head. I think we're definitely shifting from a calendar economy to more of a cultural economy. I think the winners in the brand landscape are gonna be the ones that are able to embed agility across the board in all their functions. So long story short, I think in five years, I think seasonality will matter less, it'll still be there. But commerce I think is gonna become more continuous. And as we add more of these cultures and contents and adding different ways to shop, so like how TikTok disrupted the space, I think chat GPT and AI shopping is gonna disrupt the space as well. And a lot of those things don't know any bounds of the way that people shop. And so I think we're gonna start seeing a big shift towards really specific, like hyper personalized shopping. So like different sales cycles or deals or parts of the year that certain pockets of the market will want to buy in. And so I think companies are gonna have to get a little bit smarter about their consumer base and when they wanna shop and how they wanna shop and being more agile versus thinking of it as proactivity because you can't really predict something like Labubu happening. Commerce is definitely making a big shift to flattening out, but not flattening out enough to where you can actually predict those peaks and valleys.

[00:37:06] Anand Mehta: I agree to a large degree, Nicole. I think we'll be in a blended world for some time. And I think there's an element of that that I don't think will go away. You know, I think culturally, you know, the seasonality, just let's take The U. S, for example, you know, the holiday season, Black Friday's Cyber Monday leading up to Christmas and New Year's and the winter holidays. Think the culture of kind of gift giving and, you know, people having time off and being able to maybe spend a bit more of their disposable income around those times, I think a lot of that will stay. But at the same time, to Nicole's point, you know, the way that eCommmerce happens is already changing and will continue to change drastically. And with that, I think there will come some new forms of seasonality, you know, whether that's through hyper personalization and you see peaks within more segmented pockets of customers, something like that. It's really hard to tell. I mean, AI, especially these days, is going to change everything. We already see it happening in eCommmerce in a big way. So really hard to predict. And I wish you could predict this. But no, I think it'll be some sort of blend. And I do think adaptability is going to be the key to navigate whatever comes next. But it's going to be really exciting next five, ten years to see kind of where the eCommmerce market goes and what this means for brands and what they can do and customers they can sell to.

[00:38:47] Alicia Esposito: Absolutely agree. And very profound point that some of these seasonal moments are deeply cultural and it's all kind of a continuous cycle, right? So brands need to be able to understand those moments, like what really resonates for those consumers, but also be able to act upon them so they can ensure they are relevant and impactful in the eyes of the customer. But for now, Nicole, Anand, thank you both so much for taking the time out. I think we covered a lot of great ground and provided some great, not just inspiration, but insight and guidance for everybody who is listening to this conversation. So thank you both so much for taking the time out to chat with me. Thank you.

[00:39:35] Anand Mehta: Thanks so much.

[00:39:35] Alicia Esposito: And thanks to all of you for joining us for this conversation. If you missed episode one where we got into some of the more immediate factors impacting the world of commerce. And of course we have one more episode. We're going dig into a real life story, a merchant who's going to share their experiences, their lessons and their guidance with all of you. So be sure to go to step by step series on Future Commerce.com or be sure to follow us on your preferred podcast player. That way you get that final episode as soon as it's live. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We'll see you next time.

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