Leaders of Change: Dale Calvert

DALE CALVERT is a founding partner of Montclairity, a fast-growing creative eTail content service working with many top brands. He defines his role as a facilitator of positive change to reach defined goals.

Dale has decades of experience as a creative director and marketing professional on a wide variety of major accounts in telephony, finance, publishing, travel and tourism, agriculture, and CPG. While working with CPG brands on traditional marketing materials, Dale became aware of their challenges in developing product detail page content for thousands of SKUs. His vision for Montclairity was to help brands achieve their eCommerce goals through the development of creative, problem-solving content. Montclairity is now a recognized expert in content development, having implemented thousands of pages on Amazon and other platforms.

Dale lives and works within sight of Manhattan and likes to travel the world, especially if there is a ski slope involved.

Why did you choose to pursue eCommerce in your career? I already had a long career in traditional media, but we now live in an eCommerce world so this is where I need to be. I also like to know the impact of the creative product and there’s no better place than eCommerce for that instant gratification. I find it very sad when someone tells me they don’t shop online and/or avoid social media – that’s just depressing when the entire world is in your pocket.

What is your biggest strength, and how have you used it for your success in eCommerce? Facilitation is my strength – helping others, both our clients and our own business, achieve end goals. I like to define opportunities and pull together the best team to realize those opportunities. Creating beautiful page content isn’t the end product for our organization. The content we create is the facilitator. The success of our clients is the end product.

What is the weirdest skill or talent to come in handy in your eCommerce experience? Obsessive organization. (Does a sock drawer arranged by type and color make it compulsive?) When you’re tasked with creating and implementing content for multiple brands and thousands of SKUs within 3 months, you need to have a solid, proven, well-organized plan. My need for organization was key to developing Montclairity’s exclusive methodology for developing creative and effective content.

How have you most successfully influenced change within your organization (or with your clients)? Facilitating change is what I love to do and it pays big dividends, so every day is fun and rewarding. Facilitating the creation of a bespoke eTail content service has reenergized my own company. Facilitating content implementation for our clients has fueled measured Amazon sales lifts on specific ASINs from a minimum of +24% to over +1000%. Facilitating various programs for a nonprofit doubled the number of services available, including a culinary school that maintains a 90%+ job placement rate for graduates who had few other opportunities in life. If your team has a firm vision of the change they want to create, the work is in the transition. That might be hard, but it’s always doable.

What was your most “valuable” career failure, and why? It’s a cliché, but there are only opportunities. The only failure is giving up. Resigning a large but problematic client really hurt financially but I learned that the relationship is far more important than the transaction. Resigning that client gave us the breathing room to do better things. If there is no respect and teamwork to reach a mutually agreed goal, it’s better and more profitable to move on and find a better partner. I can honestly say that we enjoy every single client we have. How great is that?

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior or habit has most improved your life? Giving back. After a conversation with someone about what it takes to be fulfilled, I realized that I should be doing something more. The very next day I got a call from a business acquaintance asking me to join the board of an anti-poverty organization to improve their communications and fundraising. Figuring that karma must be real after all, I agreed. I have gained new skills, self-confidence, friends, and connections that have improved my life and business in many ways. Be generous with your skill set and it will pay you back.

What are you learning right now? To ski those damn moguls. Plus, I spend a significant portion of every day researching and talking with connections about eCommerce issues, learning about our client’s products, business issues and goals, and investigating new opportunities and possibilities for content applications. There’s so much, it’s hard to keep up but if you’re not learning, you’re not growing.

What are the 1-3 songs that would make up your career soundtrack today?

• It’s My Life by Bon Jovi
• Good Riddance by Greenday
• Man In The Mirror by Michael Jackson

Hmmm, there’s a theme here somewhere.

What are the 1-3 books you’ve gifted the most or that have greatly influenced your life, and why?

• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: No kidding. The lessons just keep on giving. This has been called “The first great book written in America” and was fundamental to the development of both the autobiography and self-help forms of literature. Franklin wrote his autobiography well before his role in the American Revolution so we get to see what drove him before he became an icon of American independent thought. He promotes constant self-assessment, which is a pretty good principle for life and business. It’s surprising how many best-selling business books spring from it, including Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People and Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
• Freakonomics (A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner: Because “We think we know how the world operates, but we really don’t…” (from a review by the Harvard Business Review). This book makes you examine how you think. Freakonomics is also my go-to podcast.

If you could have a gigantic billboard for the world to see with anything on it, what would it say, and why? I want 2 billboards: “Change is good, it’s the transition that’s hard.” and “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” The full quote by Mark Twain is: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” I don’t think I need to elaborate.

What are the worst recommendations or advice you have heard related to eCommerce? “Wait.” Wait because we can’t offend our Brick and Mortar stores. Wait until new packaging is complete. Wait until we have the plan coordinated across all platforms. Wait for the perfect assets. Online shoppers aren’t waiting for you to catch up, they’re moving on to competitive brands. You’re not only losing sales today, you may be losing brand loyalty as well. If you have products online with no content supporting them you’re missing out on potentially dramatic sales increases. A good content plan will suggest content implementation as quickly as possible and accommodate additional adaptation as needed.

What advice would you give to a future leader of change about to enter business, or specifically the eCommerce field? Be open to change but establish and revisit the fundamentals of life, business, and projects on a regular basis. It’s very easy – and frustrating – to get lost in process and details. Sometimes the smartest person in the room is the one who simply revisits the objective.

What specific, industry-related change do you believe will happen that few others seem to see? Content is a leading factor in driving conversion and there’s always going to be a relentless need for it, but we don’t know exactly what form it’s going to take and when. Right now brands are scrambling just to implement content on existing product pages. But the convergence of AI, VR, and AR is going to present fascinating possibilities to customize content to shoppers.

What is the last thing you bought online, and why? You have to live eCommerce to know it so I buy just about everything online, and every order I place includes my clients’ products to participate in their purchase experience. As research I also buy interesting products that I believe can benefit from improved page content. Today I bought from my client Mega-Red (which I use), gym shoes (which I need), and two cool products that I’m sure will dramatically boost their Amazon search results and conversion just by improving their page content. Better living and better business through eCommerce.

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Leaders of Change is a weekly interview series featuring select industry pioneers who are driving the evolution of commerce, the consumer and everything in between. If you would like to recommend a Leader of Change for consideration, please reach out to me on LinkedIn.