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Digiday Live: How Thinx innovates in the face of taboos

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Retailers would be wise to listen to their customers. At the Digiday Retail Summit in Nashville, we heard from a series of retail executives who have built new initiatives, built new stores, and launched new social media strategies and ad campaigns around their customers. It seems like an obvious move. But as customers’ lives have shifted to revolve around their laptops and phones, retailers have been slow to keep up.

Leaders at Lane Bryant, West Elm, Rent the Runway, Thinx and more shared how they are updating existing processes or forging new ground on stage at the retail summit. If you missed the conversations, or just want to relive them, we gathered the best sessions and posted them on iTunes and Stitcher through Digiday Live, an ongoing podcast series from Digiday that features conversations and presentations from the summits we host throughout the year, all downloadable for easy listening.

In Thinx founder Miki Agrawal’s talk, which is shared above, she discusses tackling taboos by creating a product that works with, not against, its target customer: women on their periods. Thinx’s core product is an absorbent, “period-proof” underwear that is reusable — a rare product on the market to give women an alternative to pads and tampons. Agrawal’s mindset is that if something makes people uncomfortable to talk about, it’s something worth digging into.

“Stuff that people don’t talk about, that makes them uncomfortable, that people are giggling about — it’s a huge market opportunity. Massive,” Agrawal said. “We take these categories, look at them head on, forget the taboo, and actually innovate,”

Want more highlights? Here’s a glimpse of our other retail summit episodes, below. Click the links to listen to the sessions.

For more Digiday Live, follow us on iTunes and Stitcher.

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