Alumni Spotlight: Shirelle Noble, Class of 2009 – rewardStyle

Shirelle NobleShirelle Noble, BHP ’09, joined Bain & Company after graduating from BHP. After spending a few years working as a consultant, she felt it was time to make a move and found a great opportunity to do just that with rewardStyle. She is currently leading business development and partnership efforts for rewardStyle.

How would you describe what rewardStyle does?

rewardStyle connects digital style publishers and global retailers to provide marketing solutions across the web and social media.  At our core, we help fashion bloggers earn commissions from the products they promote on their blogs by providing them with tools and education. We connect the bloggers to our retail partners, who pay for the organic promotion and distribution of their products to the bloggers’ audiences. We do this by managing a technology platform which sales and other key metrics. Our tracking and platform allows us to report back to both the bloggers and retailers on performance. In short, rewardStyle is basically how fashion bloggers are able to make money from linking to products.

We didn’t invent affiliate marketing, but we were the first to make it accessible for fashion bloggers and influencers across the web. We are the market leader in our space. It is a very niche space, but also a profitable one. We work with all the major retailers in Europe and the U.S. and we are also expanding to Asia. We were also the first to launch shoppable Instagram through our product called LIKEtoKNOW.it, which has been a game changer in social media. Since Instagram doesn’t let anyone use links within their feeds, the LIKEtoKNOW.it solution allows consumers to find out what their favorite bloggers are wearing on Instagram by registering for the email service.

Tell me about your roles in sales and business development.

I was brought on board at the end of 2013 to run the team that cultivates relationships with our publishers. My role was largely focused on scaling the team and establishing strategies to keep up with our rapid growth. Our company has grown very rapidly- I was the 48th employee and now we are over 110 employees. We continue to scale to meet the growing demands of both our retail and publishing clients. At the end of last year, I transitioned into business development because of my background in strategy consulting. I was given a project to assess our European business, so I lived in London for three months to identify the growth opportunities and create the strategy plan fro 2015.

Tell me more about what you were doing for that project.

The crux of the problem was to understand the opportunity size for our European business and how to capture it in 2015. At the time, the European business was lagging the U.S., so I looked into all the individual markets to understand why.  Each European country is so different from one another, so we stopped treating the markets equally and started to think about each individual market’s revenue potential. The change of mindset has been very successful.

What work experience has been most rewarding for you so far?

The European strategy project has been most rewarding to me. When I was at Bain, I wasn’t able to see the results of my work in the real world. The European project is a great example of applying the consulting approach, but also leading the implementation. Six months later, I’m excited to see how my work is directly impacting the company.

What is your favorite part of your job?

Implementing the solutions I create and being in a fast-paced industry that is growing rapidly. We like to joke that all of our problems are “good problems to have” because they are all related to growth. A major plus of this role has been the opportunity to wear different hats and raise my hand to work on projects that interest me. Working internationally is something I love and rewardStyle has given me many opportunities to pursue that passion. I grew up in Indonesia and went to high school in Jakarta before coming to UT. Being part of the team that figures out the strategy for these new markets is something that really gets me excited and makes me want to work hard for the company.

rewardStyle has experienced rapid growth during the time you have been there. What kind of unique opportunities and challenges has that presented?

From the tech side, it is the ability to keep up with the growth of our products and data. One of the most interesting problems we are facing today is around email. Because the core product of LIKEtoKNOW.it is an email service, we are sending more than a million emails a day. It’s challenging to keep up with the volume and provide the best consumer experience.

What’s on the horizon for rewardStyle and how does that tie into the work you are doing?

International expansion is a major focus for the company, and I am leading the establishment of our first office in China. We are also continuing to grow our core services and LIKEtoKNOW.it, which is approaching one million registered users.

What experiences and skills did you gain at Bain as a consultant that have made you successful at rewardStyle?

The ability to critically think about a problem and determine the information I need to make an informed decision. I gained the ability to present a compelling recommendation to my team and build confidence in the solutions and plans I create. We are a young company, but it is a very supportive environment. One of the benefits of being in the social media/tech space is that innovators are young.

What advice would you give your college self?

Take advanced accounting, don’t avoid it! I was a BHP/Finance major and I didn’t take it because I was worried about ruining my GPA, but I wish I had gotten more of those hard skills. I also would have learned to code, even just some basic stuff. If I were a freshman, I would be looking at how I could gain some coding experience, whether in school or through a summer program. Being able to maintain a website and know some database architecture is helpful. I am trying to learn more now.

I also want to say how thankful I am for my BHP education. So many of the friends and support groups I have today are from fellow BHP-ers. Networking is really about finding a great friend group, staying in touch with them, and growing together throughout your career.

Where do you see yourself if 5 years?

I have no idea. It is hard to say! I will still be in the tech space and hopefully at a company that is growing quickly!

Alumni Spotlight – Kelly Merryman, VP of Content Acquisition for Netflix

Kelly Merryman headshotKelly Merryman, BHP ’98, manages content acquisition for Netflix in Europe.  She began her tenure at Netflix in 2007 licensing content for the US market. She co-led Netflix’s international expansion, acquiring TV series and films, in countries including Canada, Latin America, the UK and Ireland, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. Prior to joining Netflix, Kelly held positions in digital distribution and business development at Sony Pictures Entertainment, and spent time at both Bain & Company and Audax Group, a private equity firm in Boston.

Take me through your career progression from starting at Bain to ending up at Netflix.

Coming out of UT, I was looking for an opportunity to work in management consulting. I thought it would be a great way to build a strong skill set working in different industries and learning about various companies. I accepted a job with Bain in their Dallas office as a consultant. I worked for an airline in South Africa and actually lived there for a bit. I also worked in the automotive and paper sectors, as well as online travel. I learned a lot about myself and about working in different, large organizations.

I felt it was time to make the bets myself and move away from consulting, so I decided to join a private equity shop. Audax Group was founded by leadership from Bain Capital, looking to return to Bain Capital’s roots of investing in middle-market companies. It was an opportunity to execute on the vision component I had worked on as a consultant and see if it actually worked. I got to see what it meant to motivate an employee base during a change in strategy. The experience of thinking about the value of brands and consumers was really fun.

After getting my MBA from Harvard I took a job in LA with Sony and spent two years in their business and corporate development group figuring out how their distribution of media was going to evolve with the introduction of digital. From there, I jumped into the licensing group to actually do the distribution deals and not just plan them. I enjoy the value of negotiating deals and finding a way for two partners to create a new business.

In 2007, a lot of players entered the market place for digital distribution and Netflix reached out to me about joining their team to do digital licensing. I have been here ever since and have had an unbelievable experience. We had about 7 million subscribers in the US when I joined, now we have over 44 million on the streaming side and about a quarter of those are outside of the U.S.

What are your key responsibilities and areas of focus as the VP of Content Acquisition?

I am responsible for content acquisition for Europe.  This means that my team and I set the programming strategy for Netflix in the different countries we serve in Europe.  We select the titles, negotiate the deals and manage the budget.  Another key part of my role is driving the European expansion strategy for Netflix, determining which countries we should move into next.  I do this in close alignment with our Marketing VP for Europe.

I read that one of the ways you determine viewers’ interest in a show before buying it is checking how it has done on piracy sites. Can you talk more about that?

There are a variety of ways in which we evaluate programming. We focus most of our time on feature films and scripted TV series. We look at their performance in the market to see what the demand is. Performance on piracy sites is one piece of the puzzle, so are box office figures and linear TV ratings as well as DVD sales. This information helps us understand where there is a need. If we can identify a TV series people are watching on a pirate site because it isn’t available, we can try to license it so they have a legitimate way to view that content.

Can you talk more about Netflix’s decision to make original series content?

Ted Sarandos, our head of content,  was the champion of House of Cards, one of our first original series. He had a vision and we all jumped on board quickly. As we continue to grow our business, we want to have a much more exclusive set of TV series and films, and some of those will be original productions. This helps us define our brand and generate excitement and buzz. Netflix today is much more like a channel, albeit pure on demand, instead of a broad distributor. This strategy helps keep subscribers longer.

You were very involved in the expansion of Netflix to other countries. What were the main challenges in making those deals and how has that expansion affected the company?

The biggest question we had was “is Netflix a U.S. service?” We had to ask ourselves if everyone in the world would be interested in on-demand, or if that was uniquely American. Expanding into other countries validated that the demand was there. For the content side, we had to dive in and recognize that each market is unique and we needed to spend the money to develop those local partnerships to get the right content. We had to convince investors of the need for upfront investments that would pay off later. And they have.

What is the best part of your job?

The people. We have such a unique culture over here. We find really impressive experts in their space and give them freedom and responsibility. Being at the forefront of changing this industry is special and exciting.

Were there any specific classes at McCombs that stand out to you or helped prepare you for what you have been doing?

The case method taught in small classrooms was great. It was valuable to learn to work through solving a problem that wasn’t just in one area, but in all areas and learning how they came together. My favorite class was a marketing class taught by Shelby Carter. He would talk about unique challenges he had faced in his professional life and ask us how we would have dealt with it. Seeing those real-life examples and the grey area was enlightening. I realized nothing was as easy as it looks on paper and the answers aren’t always black and white.

Any advice for current BHP students?

Spend time networking with your classmates. They will be some of the most important people in your future. Always ask questions and ask speakers about their most challenging moments and how they handled it. Understanding how people deal with challenges can teach you a lot.