ButcherBox CMO Kiran Smith details her strategy for transforming a fragmented, startup-style marketing operation into a streamlined, scalable function to support future growth. She explains how to unify disparate marketing teams, build a cohesive roadmap, and leverage strong customer loyalty to propel a bootstrapped, profitable subscription business past the $600 million revenue mark.
Most people say the subscription box era is over. Then there's ButcherBox. The Boston-based meat subscription company has been bootstrapped since it launched in 2015. The company is profitable. And it continues to grow -- it brought in more than $600 million of revenue in 2022. What made ButcherBox work for the first eight years was its scrappy mentality -- one that focused on profitable growth. Now, the company is reaching its adolescence and brought in a veteran marketer to lead the charge. Kiran Smith was named CMO last year, coming from companies like iRobot, Arnold Worldwide and Brookstone. Her mandate was to systematize the entire marketing schema for the company. "What I found when I arrived about a year ago is that marketing was spread across six different teams, across multiple people within the business," Smith said on the Modern Retail Podcast. This wasn't a bad thing, but for a scaling company, it meant that some workflows had to change. "That's why I was hired," Smith said, "to help build us for that next stage of growth." Part of the focus was on figuring out the latent potential. "There's so much ahead of us, in terms of capabilities that we can build out as marketers," Smith said. But the biggest focus this year was on recreating the marketing organization. "I would say it took up most of the first year," she said. It involved figuring out how to make six different teams work under one leader, as well as creating a cohesive roadmap that fits the overall goals of the company. But even with this daunting task, Smith said that much of ButcherBox's marketing is already in place thanks to its rabid fan base. "That helps a lot — that we have our members' belief in us and in our products," she said. With that, Smith said this was the type of job she's always wanted -- a company that's growing but isn't hampered by the patterns and bureaucracies most billion-dollar companies face. "I didn't find it daunting," she said. "I found it exciting."