When we talk about innovation, we usually think of the hot new startups, we don't typically think of 100+ year old brands. But when an old respected brand needs to be resuscitated, innovation is exactly what is needed.
Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with another FUTR podcast.
Today we are talking with Sridhar Solur, CEO of Kenmore Brands. Kenmore is know for its quality home appliances, but with the demise of Sears, who owned Kenmore, the brand needed to revitalize itself. That is when Sridhar stepped in at the helm of Kenmore brands to innovate their way back to the top, focusing on the electrified home.
So, let's talk to the man behind the mission
Welcome Sridhar
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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts featuring Chris Brandt and Sandesh Patel talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.
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When we talk about innovation, we usually think of the hot new startups, we don't typically think of 100+ year old brands. But when an old respected brand needs to be resuscitated, innovation is exactly what is needed.
Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with another FUTR podcast.
Today we are talking with Sridhar Solur, CEO of Kenmore Brands. Kenmore is know for its quality home appliances, but with the demise of Sears, who owned Kenmore, the brand needed to revitalize itself. That is when Sridhar stepped in at the helm of Kenmore brands to innovate their way back to the top, focusing on the electrified home.
So, let's talk to the man behind the mission
Welcome Sridhar
Click Here to Subscribe:
FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts featuring Chris Brandt and Sandesh Patel talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.
Occasionally we share links to products we use. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases on Amazon.
When we talk about innovation, we usually think of the hot new startups, and we don't typically think of 100-plus-year-old brands. But when an old, respected brand needs to be resuscitated, innovation is exactly what is needed. Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with another FUTR Podcast. Today we're talking with Sri Solur, CEO of Kenmore Brands. Kenmore is known for its quality home appliances, but with the demise of Sears, who owned Kenmore, the brand needed to revitalize itself. That's when Sri stepped in at the helm of Kenmore Brands to innovate their way back to the top, focusing on the electrified home. So let's talk to the man behind the mission. Welcome Sri. Sri Solur Thank you, Chris, for having me on your podcast. Chris Brandt Well, I'm excited to talk to you because, you know, we had a brief conversation before and you're an interesting person with an interesting story and, you know, you've got kind of a great opportunity to reinvent, you know, a famous brand. So that's got to be exciting stuff, right? Sri Solur You are the product of your circumstances and gratitude matters in this scenario. I have to say that this opportunity fell on my lap and it could have been anyone else. So I'm grateful for having this opportunity to walk you through the Phoenix moment of Kenmore and Die Hard as brands associated with home appliances. Chris Brandt Tell me a little bit about you, I mean, because you've kind of had an interesting personal journey. Tell me about like how you got to be here. Sri Solur I'm going to keep that really short. I was born in India, went to an engineering school there. But a little bit of a detour about my engineering school. I was, I grew up in the south of India, but I initially went to an engineering school in the northern tip of India in Kashmir. The year, you know, is '88,'89. And at that point in time, Kashmir became a conflict zone. And being an ethnic minority in a conflict zone is a wee bit traumatic, if you will. And I had to basically architect the migration of the students from Kashmir to the different engineering colleges around the country. And this is about talking to the politicians. This is about writing articles in the newspaper, being actually an activist. And I lost a year doing that. But we were very successful in getting all the students out. And that was a very pivotal moment of my life, wherein this was about not just me, but making sure that I take the whole group of students along with me. So I graduated in electronics and communication and worked in multiple small companies initially. And I was attached to a multinational called Digital Equipment Corporation, worked on products like AltaVista, the first, one of the first earlier well-known search engines. Tech brought me to the US, very grateful for that. And then they paid for my business school and for the education here. What I have realized is anytime there's a setback in life, think of a setback as a shortcut to a phenomenal comeback. I have seen that happen in several walks of life. And from tech, it was, you know, Compaq and HP, that was a 20-year run. But I've always been involved in building new innovative businesses. So I founded something called Cloud Print, the technology behind printing for mobile phones, then went on to build a wearable business for brands like Hugo Boss, Juicy Couture, Ferrari, Coach, Movado, and got into fashion tech. That helped a wee bit, you know. And then went on to run product and engineering for Comcast, for their IoT group, for their home security and home automation business. And then my journey took me to a private equity-based small appliance company called Shark Ninja. We built robots there, which was phenomenally interesting. It's a company that built vacuum cleaners and grills. A robot, that generation of robot, the advanced-nav robot that we built, had 47 million lines of code. Think about it. Trying to be a tech company in a company that is not really techie was really hard. But the beauty of Shark Ninja was it was a phenomenally customer-focused company. So there's always learning along the way. And then I went on to be the chief product officer for an industrial robotics startup. And I just look back right now and say,"Oh my God, for six years of my life, I've built robots that have been shipping, over 3 million robots that have been built, and they are in people's homes, and people are touching it." And around 18 months ago, or a wee bit more than that, I got an opportunity to be the CEO of Kenmore. And here I am, again, very grateful for the serendipitous opportunity that fell on my lap and very grateful that someone took a chance on me to be a first-time CEO. I got to imagine now we're going to see some really cool Kenmore robots, right? We're finally going to get that Jetsons robot Rosie to come and clean our house and take maybe with a little less sass. Well, I really think it's iterative. As I said, the Phoenix moment, Kenmore as a brand was tightly coupled with Sears and coming out of bankruptcy. The beauty is Sears brand, and especially Kenmore being tightly coupled to Sears, and when we uncoupled it, I want to highlight that people still love the Kenmore brand. So I'm grateful to be in charge of a brand that has such wide recognition in the marketplace. And then taking it through and building products under the Kenmore brand that resonates with the hierarchy of needs. So when Sears went under, assets like Kenmore and DieHard ended up in this other company called TransformCo, right? And so that's sort of the parent organization for all of this, correct? But Kenmore, like you said, is, you know, I remember growing up with Kenmore and Kenmore appliances and all that stuff. I mean, you know, Kenmore is a very popular brand. And I think you mentioned that Kenmore originally started in what, 1913? 1913, yeah. That's crazy. That's a wild ride, huh? And every decade, the brand has reinvented itself. What is the strategy for taking, you know, a respected brand like that and then revitalizing and creating something new? I know, you know, one of the things that's big for you is electrified home. That's getting rid of the gas appliances and things like that. So can you talk to like, how you revitalize this brand, how you tap into, you know, like a current movement that's going on and how you bring it all together? Let me put it this way. Three lines of businesses. The first one, what we call is a wholesale business. We're in, think large appliances, think kitchen, suite, think laundry. And that's been the core of Kenmore products. The first thing that I needed to do for that specific business, I'll talk about the other two lines of businesses in a moment, is making sure that we have a phenomenal supply of products from innovative OEMs. That's really, really important. And I can say that in the last one year, we went from one OEM was manufacturing products for Kenmore to like, we'll end up this year with nine. We were supply constrained, Chris. And the first thing is identifying the problem. And it was very quickly, we figured out that the current set of OEMs that were relevant to us for the last decade is not going to take us to the next decade. Identifying the new OEMs who could help us with innovative features, who could help us with the ability to integrate the products together was really, really important. And we were able to do that in the last, I would say, 14 to 15 months. So that's number one for the wholesale business. We were supply constrained and you open up that supply constraint. So when you're going to change out your OEMs, I've got to imagine that you want to, you know, produce a quality product. So you're reaching out to find these new vendors who are going to live up to the legacy of the brand. But you obviously need to have these folks that are doing new things with interesting digital features and online and Wi-Fi enabled things or stuff like that. I mean, how do you strike that kind of balance to find the right level of innovation, reliability, trustworthiness, all that? It's the three-step process. The first one is getting the basics right. And when I say getting the basics right, you want to make sure there are quality checks and balances. At the end of the day, when you get a product in your home, it has to work every time, all the time, and it has to work for the next 15 to 30 years. So the performance testing of the product should be amazing. This is basic. Performance testing is like all the feature sets, you know. If you're baking, there are like 30 different KPIs associated with baking, and you want to make sure that that really works and it's amazing. And then the second part of the test is reliability. You know, we call this as halt testing, highly accelerated lifetime testing, making sure that you test the product to a lifetime, 15 years, 20 years, 30 years. The product should work amazingly well for a very long period of time. So that's getting the basics right. And Chris, we spent a lot of time in the labs validating our OEMs to make sure that the products that we bring into the market are extremely high quality, not just with feature sets, but for a period of time. So that's number one. That's interesting because, you know, most products nowadays are not geared with that kind of a life cycle in mind. I mean, cars, you know, like all sorts of things are not, even houses I feel like sometimes are not designed with that sort of lifespan in mind. So that's a tricky, you know, constraint to work against. Yeah, I mean, it also works against you, right? Because the replacement cycle is basically now like far extended. But at the end of the day, when I see reviews and feedback saying that,"Oh, my Kenmore fridge in the garage actually keeps my beer the coldest." You have to have that phenomenal empathy for a Kenmore customer. That's really, really important. So that's number one. Number two is making sure that there is one or two features that differentiates that specific product in the marketplace. And let me explain this and I'll give you a specific example. You have ovens and, you know, integrated into ranges. But if you can incorporate air frying into it, it's a wee bit of a differentiator for us, right? Making sure that there are differentiated feature sets for the same price point so the customer can actually walk in, look around and say,"Hey, you know what? This is a new kind of cooking." And we have made sure that we focus on a specific part of our brand identity called Live More. So anything that is healthy cooking, clean air, clean water, clean food is my focus. So any specific feature set that we are trying to bring into the market is associated with Living More. Think Kenmore, Live More. So that's the second part. The third part that we focus on, Chris, is making sure that these product suites work together in some shape, way, or form. It's not like you get a product from OEM 1, OEM 2. You want to be able to integrate that. We have done two levels of integration. One, making sure that the product looks and, you know, design integration, which is the visual brand language. But the second kind of integration is you integrate in such a way that the digital twin of the product just works seamlessly. When you say digital twin, can you expand on that? Connected living, right? Think about it. You know, moving from a world where you had 300 million laptops and desktops in the early 2000s to 3+ billion, now actually 5 billion, smartphones to now we are moving into the era of objects where there are 300 billion, and fast moving towards 3 trillion objects connected to the internet. Every physical object has a digital instantiation. On the digital twin side, even if the products are made by multiple OEMs, they look absolutely coherent as though they are made for each other. They work with each other. And you will see this story in the world of electrification too, because now with the energy dashboard, when the utility basically says,"Hey, you know what? We are in a high demand scenario at this point in time. And in this high demand scenario, we want to make sure that we can throttle back electricity. We should be able to work within the appliances to make sure that we don't put the demand on the grid." Right. So, making sure that we have the ability to work that way. The point is, I want to summarize three things. One, get the basics right. Quality. Performance testing, reliability testing, highly accelerated lifetime testing. Get that right. Two, for the specific products, make sure that there is a differentiating feature set. And that feature set should be associated with living more. Clean air, clean water, clean food. And the third one is making sure that the suite of products actually work really, really well together. Yeah. That sounds like a good strategy to get there. But I mean, I got to imagine it's tricky to innovate on top of something that's been around for 50, 60, 70, 100 years. I'll give you a phenomenal framework. And there's a framework that I love, appealing to the human instincts. There are four parts to human instincts. The first one is any product that you create, we've realized very early on, it has to appeal to the brain. It's like Google-esque. You got to look at the product and say,"Hm, clever little thing." The second thing is it has to appeal to the heart. In some shape, way, or form. In your messaging, in the feature set, it should be mission-led, impact-driven. Story should be told with the feature set of the products. And you can do that with literally any kitchen-related product. I'll give you an example. Hold on to that thought. I'll come back to the heart. The third thing, I'm a product guy, is what I call as appealing to the stomach or the gut. It's about you should make sure that a consumer is getting so much more for so little. A great example of that is Amazon. Amazon Prime. Think about it. Do you know one person who has churned out of Amazon Prime, Chris? You get,"Hey, wait a minute. Two-day delivery. I get video. I get Amazon Music. I get photo backups for free." It goes on and on. So, so much more for so little. That appeals to the gut. And finally, some kind of a status symbol, very Apple-esque. And I have given you some examples of this framework and connected to companies. You know, what is a common thread there, Chris? All those companies are trillion-dollar companies. And they appeal to the human instincts. And as a product guy from day one, I wanted to make sure that any product that we bring to market under the Kenmore brand appeals to the human instincts. I know those are basics, but I said appealing to the heart. And I just want to say something here about Kenmore as a brand. I thought Kenmore as a brand was relevant to Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. I thought Gen Zs would have no clue. Millennials will have no clue. You know, they don't have, you know, they have not heard of the Sears catalog. I was explaining to my kids the other day, just like what the, how, how things got ordered in the old days, you know, before you had computers and you get this catalog in the mail and I was like, you'd call up and you talk to somebody and say, yeah, six to eight weeks for delivery. Gen Zs are buying Kenmore. And I was like, how in the world is that even possible? You know why, Chris? It reminds them of their grandmothers cooking. The initiative to electrify the home, which has become oddly controversial in some ways around here. But you know, who, who, who would have guessed that burning natural gas inside of your home with the windows closed and breathing all the fumes from that is probably not the healthiest thing to do, right? And you know, similarly, you have, you know, dryers and, you know, washing machines and things like that. Dryers run on gas and you've got to keep that vent clean. Otherwise, you know, down in the basement and all of a sudden you pass out because you're breathing carbon monoxide. You know, there's all sorts of problems and challenges with non-electric appliances, right? So can you, can you speak to the importance of electrifying your home and, you know, why does it matter and how are you going about doing it? The first thing is about energy security. Let's talk about energy security for a minute. Energy security is a bipartisan legislation in the US. It doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. You want to make sure that we are self-sufficient when it comes to energy. The last thing you want is if OPEC reduces oil production, if the gas prices across the country goes up, literally a major population in the US, they're up in arms. That happens all the time. All the time, you know, when gas prices go up. Second, our energy infrastructure, when it gets attacked by cyber attacks, it's a threat against the United States. So liberating yourself from the tyranny of external forces and securing your energy infrastructure is something that is paramount. Electrification helps you get there. Let me walk you through that. Whole home electrification, forget the health aspects of it, put that aside. You highlighted that more eloquently than I would have. With energy security as a focus, with whole home electrification, when there is a demand on the grid on a very hot day, on a very cold day, you fire up inefficient generators, fossil fuel-based generators. And guess what happens to the consumer? They pay higher rates for those fossil fuel-based generators that are generating electricity for your home. Even if the conversation is not about health, even if the conversation is not about,"Hey, stop using your gas tower and move to electric," the conversation here is energy security for the country. The conversation here is paying higher prices. As a capitalistic country, we want to pay less whenever possible, and we want to keep the country secure. So in addition to some of the health benefits that you highlighted, I think there's energy security and there is phenomenal cost savings. And just for those two aspects, whole home electrification is a main agenda for us. And there is a mission for us, and we are also very well placed. And let me explain this. We didn't go into the details of TransformCo. After Sears bankruptcy, the formation of TransformCo as a holding company that was formed, there are multiple companies under TransformCo. Kenmore and DieHard as a brand. You have Sears Home Services. This is basically 2,500-plus technician ] driving trucks who are on our payroll, who are actually going in and repairing appliances in people's homes. They do 80,000 visits in one week to people's homes. 80,000 one week in people's homes. That's crazy. And then there's a real estate part of the company, and there is a fintech part of the company. I won't go into the details, but that's in the TransformCo umbrella. So Kenmore has tied up with Sears Home Services, and when they go in to people's homes 80,000 times a week, they look at all the appliances, and if there is a replacement cycle that is due, they look at that, and they also have a clear understanding of the zip code of the home. They have some understanding of household income. And guess what, Chris? The Inflation Reduction Act that was passed last year, there are rebates for moderate income families, low-income families. These rebates are really big rebates, and we can directly look at those rebates and say,"For your home, you can potentially get $14,000 of appliances for free." Is it really that much? Yeah, depending on your household income. Wow, that's a good chunk of change. Yeah, and you can swap out your appliances. Now tell me, the conversation is not about gas or electric. It's free or highly subsidized or not. That relationship is number one. One of the reasons why I think Kenmore and Whole Home Electrification makes sense is because there is a force that's going into people's homes to repair appliances, and they have an understanding, and they can basically swap out the appliances. So that's number one. Second, we have a spectacular array of appliances, not just traditional appliances, but what I call is energy appliances. We signed this relationship with Spann. You will see more and more products under the Kenmore brand. EV chargers, we announced diehard branded EV chargers. You talk about electrification of the home, but even outside the home, or a combination of EVs are a way also to help with the electrification of the home as well, because they're a battery sitting there, right? 100%. Personally, from somebody who has an electric vehicle, we need more chargers out there, desperately. I agree. I agree. I mean, again, the infrastructure bill in terms of putting in more commercial and consumer EV chargers, the subsidies, we are playing in that space. That's a rising tide, and it's so natural. Think about it. Diehard EV charger kind of rolls out, right? Diehard power, EV. So again, I'm very happy to say that you will see that in addition to that heat pump-based water heaters, heat pump-based HVACs under the Kenmore brand. So it's not just kitchen appliances. Chris, what you've just heard is energy appliances playing in this space. The third thing that I want to highlight is our relationship with organizations like Rewiring America, EPA. In May of 1992, Kenmore was one of the pioneers in terms of bringing appliances to the market with energy star rating. And we have continued to nurture that relationship with EPA, Rewiring America. So that's another piece. Well, and I'll say one other thing to all that, too, because you mentioned building a product that's going to last 10, 20 years, 25 years, whatever. I mean, I'm sure there's 60, 70-year-old Kenmore appliances still out there. But when you talk about the environment, one of the best ways to improve the environmental situation is to produce products that last longer so that they're not ending up in a landfill and you're not going through the manufacturing processes as often. I mean, even just fast fashion is crushing us. Appliances that require a lot of industrial resources and there's metals and plastics and all sorts of bulk in there, disposing them is a lot. You hit the nail on the head. These fast replacement cycles where every cycle you create a product and try to create an artificial need \ in the marketplace to buy the product, we've got to take a very hard look. We are going through a world of deglobalization. The world that we knew for the last 70 years where things were faster, cheaper, is going away. And that should be really, really well-known at this point in time. There is reshoring of manufacturing that is happening with the current geopolitical dynamic. And that is not deflationary. That's inflationary. When Tom Friedman wrote the book, The World is Flat, you could basically create a product in the U.S., design in the U.S., get it manufactured in China, and shipping costs were ridiculously low. Interest rates were ridiculously low. You could bring it back. You could flood this market with products made elsewhere. And now we are in a very different reality at this point in time, Chris. Well, I mean, manufacturing in other countries isn't quite what it used to be either, because the standards of living have risen in those countries and the prices have gone up in a lot of those locations as well. So it's a different game board now. And demographic impact. The population in those countries are getting older, and the younger population, you know, for example, there is a demographic issue in multiple parts of the world. The average population is just growing older and people are not having enough kids. That means they're not getting into the workforce, so it's not cheaper to build products in other parts of the world. So we are in a world of deglobalization at this point in time. Yeah, I mean, if it's going to cost more, you might as well make them last. 100%. You know, you hit the nail on the head, and that works really well with the current geopolitical dynamic of deglobalization that's happening all over. And I also want to highlight one other thing and summarize the electrification journey that we are on. We are working with different government organizations so that we can take rebates at the till. So it's not like you have to pay out of the pocket, and then you send some stuff off to the government and you don't know when you're going to get the money back. We want to make it really, really easy. So to summarize, we have, from an electrification journey, it's our brand value. Can more equals live more? And our focus is not just health, but it's about energy security. It's about cost savings to the consumer. And I think it makes a whole lot of sense. And Kenmore is an affordable innovation brand. You know, we are not like a brand that's high up there that's only for the rich and famous. This brand is for every American. Second is we have technicians with our sister company, Sears Home Services, who are walking into people's homes 80,000 times a week. That's an interesting point, because a lot of the companies have gotten into this market don't really have that kind of repair organization. They don't have that service and support organization. The third one is we not only have appliances, but energy appliances that can play with the grid very, very important. We work with companies like EPA and Rewiring America, that's relationships, you know, that's been with us for quite some time, especially with the EPA. And finally, working with organizations like the IRS and SmartBin and making sure that we can take rebates of the till to make this so easy for the consumer. So I would say those are the five things that's playing for us. And then the relationships, we have Silicon Valley startups who want to work with us, which is really, really cool. You know, like the spans of the world and you'll see an array of energy appliances under the Kenmore brand. It's got to be nice not having sort of the bureaucratic infrastructure of a large organization like Sears slow down progress, you know, for a company that wants to get stuff done. We work on weekly sprints and I come from a legacy of software and high tech where, you know, weekly or, you know, at least every 15 days having a sprint every 15 days is natural. But guess what? Our legal is on weekly sprints, our operations team, supply chain is on weekly sprints, our product engineering, everybody's on weekly sprints in our organization. And the pace at which we work, I can easily say we have quadruple. We are asset light, we are fast moving. And I want to talk a little bit about asset light. It's like we don't have an albatross around our neck with a massive manufacturing facility. I work with innovative OEMs. I work with an organization that has 25 plus hundred technicians driving around. Those assets are not on my books. We are a lean, mean, keen organization focused on bringing products to market, both wholesale and we have a business called licensing. And there is one other thing that I want to highlight here, Chris. I said we went from one OEM to like nine OEMs, which is really interesting. And these are emerging OEMs. These are not like the dinosaur OEMs that we worked with in our past. Last year, if you wanted to walk into a store to pick up a Kenmore product and if your life depended on it, it would have been really, really hard. Today, Kenmore products are available in 5,278 locations, including Target, Walmart, BJ's, Meyers, Canadian Tire, Amazon. You can go Costco, Lowe's. The point I'm trying to highlight is we basically went from just a handful of locations to over 5,000 locations, well-known locations where Kenmore roducts are available. So that's an exponential ramp up, a part of our Phoenix moment. One supplier to like nine, it's a part of an exponential ramp up. Electrification story where we have leveraged our sister organization, leveraged our relationships, leveraged the installation capabilities. And most importantly, being true to our brand of Kenmore equals LiveMore, looking at DieHard and power and saying,"How can we play in this space with EV chargers, storage?" And you will continue to see us innovating with the two brands that are loved by all Americans. I'm ready for my DieHard Powerwall. It's a really interesting story. It's really interesting to see what Kenmore can do outside of the umbrella of Sears organization that is putting increasingly more constraints on it as time went on. So what do you see as like, what can we expect next from Kenmore? What's the next big thing coming out for you guys? Focusing on two things. One, an expansion in terms of the breadth of products and availability in terms of locations. You'll continue to see that. And the breadth of products that when we bring to market is going to be differentiated and integrated feature set. That had stopped with the company going through bankruptcy and coming out. So you're going to see that exponential ramp up, the Phoenix moment. In addition to that, moving into the world of connected living. And when I say connected living, we are talking about energy, energy appliances, and whole home electrification being a significant player in that space. Execution matters. Connection is great, but execution is what we are focused on, on those two vectors. We went from a handful of locations to over 5,000 locations in terms of availability of products. Going from one OEM to like nine innovative emerging OEMs as a proof points of execution. And then the whole home electrification accelerating that. We made a statement saying that we want to get a million homes electrified. And you'll continue to see us accelerating on the journey with Kenmore equals live more and die hard equals power. And think about it this way, anything die hard, garage, anything Kenmore is in the home.- That line gets blurred more and more every day. Well, I mean, hopefully this will put people on notice that Kenmore Brands is back and to check them out. And if people want to find Kenmore, where is the best place for them to go find out more?- Wherever they shop.- Wherever they shop.- That's the most, wherever they shop online, go to Amazon, go to Target, go to BJ's. We will have products wherever you shop.- Thanks so much Sri for being on. It sounds like a really exciting journey for you. I'm excited to see where Kenmore goes. I'm kind of excited to see how the whole electrification movement goes. And I really want to see more chargers on the road. So I'm excited about that. So thanks so much for being on and good luck with everything.- And Chris, thank you for having me on the show. Have a wonderful rest of the day.- Thanks for watching. Let us know what you think in the comments. And if you could, please give us a like, think about subscribing, and I will see you in the next one.[MUSIC PLAYING]