Founder Friday with Marie Chevrier Schwartz of Sampler
Sampler founder & CEO Marie Chevrier Schwartz leveraged her background in venture capital and passion for marketing and technology to transform how consumer product companies build personalized relationships with their target consumers. Sampler is a digital product sampling platform distributing direct-to-home samples from brands like Kraft-Heinz, Nestle, and L’Oreal to millions of consumers in 23 countries including the U.S., Canada, and France.
We caught up with Marie to hear what’s new for Sampler, what’s coming up next, insights into what’s happening in the industry, and advice she would give to her past self and up-and-coming women founders.
What’s New
It’s been a big and exciting 2023: Sampler has made not one but TWO acquisitions this year, acquiring Abeo in March and AdMass in July.
Through the acquisition of Abeo, a New York-based digital sampling agency focused primarily on premium beauty, Sampler has been excitedly bringing their team over with their specialized talent as it relates to executing campaigns with some of the world's most premium beauty brands. Some of the clients that they are working with include great names like EltaMD and Orveon.
With such a bustling year, it’s no surprise that this is Sampler’s fifth year in a row making The Globe and Mail's list of Canada’s Top Growing Companies!
What’s Next
Sampler is going international. One of the big moves on the horizon is their growth into Europe, specifically in France.
They have a new and exciting retailer partnership that they can't speak about just yet (keep an eye on their social media for announcements!), but what they can share is through their acquisition of Abeo, they now have a team based in Paris.
The team is also working on launching fresh and interesting ways of interacting with the Sampler platform. With more news coming about that soon, ultimately, it will give access and new types of offers to consumers.
What Marie Is Excited About Right Now
A major trend that Sampler has been following is the growth of retail media. Many brands they work with, like consumer packaged goods companies, are flocking away from spending on the top social media channels (think: Meta and TikTok). Instead, they are headed more toward shopper / retail media as a more effective channel.
The main reason that retail media is on a spike? Because it’s the first time brands get to see full closed-loop attribution for their marketing efforts. For example, you might advertise on Meta, and that could influence someone to drive and buy at their preferred store, like Walmart. The problem with this is that you don't truly have the ability to see the conversion. Whereas using retail media channels combined with a retailer’s online shopping portal, you can trace all the way to purchase.
Answering that trend, Sampler has launched their retail media offering, Sampler Retail Exchanges, allowing retailers to launch digital sampling programs at checkout that are fully white labeled to them. See: the retail media sampling program in partnership with Kroger.
The other trend Sampler is keeping a close eye on is regarding data privacy concerns. Consumers are much more aware of how their data is controlled and used, which has driven shifts like changes to iOS privacy settings or the slow death of the third-party cookie. As a result, this is pushing brands to think about how to build one-to-one relationships with consumers in a data privacy compliant way.
For years, Sampler has been ahead of its game in this category. All of the data collected on Sampler is self-reported and privacy compliant; they are able to get consumers to share quite a bit of data in exchange for an incentive—in this case, product samples (because who doesn't love samples?). That said, the team anticipates that the data privacy trend will be an accelerator for the business.
Advice to Your Past Self & Other Women Founders
“Just get started. I think that there are so many excuses early on to just say, maybe it's not the right time, or maybe I should wait until I'm more financially stable, or I'll wait for work to get less busy,” Marie says. “And the reality is that, ultimately, there's never a right time to get started.”
The first step in starting your business doesn't need to be this massive thing; it could be a super small start. Think: I'm going to register my corporation, or I'm going to have two customer interviews this week.
“I think there's kind of this misconception that starting a business comes with a red carpet and trumpets and this big ceremony, but the reality is you can start a business with just taking that first small initial step.”
What Marie found is that once she got in the rhythm of committing to herself—a small step every week or a few small steps every week—she really got going.
Stop putting it off. Get started. There's no right time ever.