Yves Le Breton is currently a Digital Strategy & Development Consultant at YLB Consulting LLC and has 20+ years of experience helping CPG brands with digital transformation and eCommerce strategy. He spent most of his career working at Estée Lauder, but has also worked for Beiersdorf, American Eagle Outfitters, and Revlon to name a few.

Furthermore, Yves has lived and worked on 4 different continents and, as a result, is well versed on the challenges traditional CPG brands face when addressing the global digital economy.

Why did you choose to pursue eCommerce in your career? I’ve always been fascinated with technology. As a kid I loved building remote control cars – still do – and fiddling with electronics. I remember distinctly a friend of mine getting an Apple II in the early 1980’s and going crazy over it! We would stay up all night playing with it and learning to program on our own. My first “app” was a simple process that would generate 7 random integers with no repeats between 1 and 56 so we could play the lotto. Later on, in the early 1990’s, when Netscape made it easier to navigate the internet, I decided I wanted a job that would have something to do with this new “thing”, but it wasn’t until 2000 that I landed my first job in ecommerce and I’ve never looked back since then. I love how ecommerce is constantly changing and evolving, which forces brands to reinvent the way they do business every few years.

What is your biggest strength, and how have you used it for your success in eCommerce? I think my biggest strength is never being afraid to challenge the status quo. I always strive to find a better way of doing things, and I won’t accept that things must be done in a certain way just because they’ve always been done that way. Change is hard and many people are afraid of change, but I strongly believe that to stay relevant we must question and reinvent ourselves regularly. Taking risks is scary because we’re all afraid to make mistakes, but to avoid situations in which we might make mistakes is the biggest mistake of all.

What is the weirdest skill or talent to come in handy in your eCommerce experience? Having a rudimentary knowledge of Photoshop, or any other image editing software, can be hugely beneficial to anyone in the field of ecommerce. Understanding the difference between the CMYK and RGB color spaces, how to resize an image without any distortion or loss of quality, and how to transform images into different formats, to name a few, can save you a lot of time and frustration as an ecommerce professional.

How have you most successfully influenced change within your organization (or with your clients)? I’ve found that the most helpful thing in business is to actively listen to what your colleagues and customers are saying. Too many people just try to force their point of view on others instead of trying to understand why others may be reluctant to see things your way. People will willingly tell you what their problems are if you are prepared to listen, and if you can help them solve their problems instead of asking them to solve yours you will be a lot more successful in life.

What was your most “valuable” career failure, and why? There was a time when I used to own a restaurant, and I learned A LOT about being a small business owner, and about how society defines winners and losers. In the end I had to close the restaurant because it was not profitable, but along the way I learned many valuable lessons that I never would have learned otherwise. Things like how lucky I am to have been “born on the right side of the tracks”, how a dream and hard work aren’t always enough to be successful, how important it is to always plan for the worst while still hoping for the best, and how bigger businesses throw their weight around to defend their turf.

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior or habit has most improved your life? Definitely listening to podcasts during my commute. I used to only listen to music on my commute, but I switched to podcasts a few years ago and I’m very happy I did. I’ve learned so many interesting things about history (Throughline), tech (Pivot), business startups (How I Built This), human psychology (Hidden Brain), economics (Freakonomics), politics (Political Gabfest), parenting (various) and more. Podcasts are an amazing way to hear from people with first hand experience and years of knowledge on a particular topic, and I find it very rewarding.

What are you learning right now? 10th grade physics. Like most parents I’m now also a part-time high school teacher to my kids, and there’s one class that’s been kicking my butt and it’s physics. I literally had to go on Khanacademy.org to relearn things I had long forgotten like Newton’s laws of motion, fluid dynamics and rotational kinematics. Fun times!

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

• Benny and the Jets by Elton John: Not because of its meaning – which I’m still trying to figure out – but because I associate it with my first job out of college. I had just landed in a foreign land and was staying with friends while looking for permanent housing, and they were obsessed with Elton John.
• Touch the Sky by Kanye West: Because it’s the earliest memory I have of playing a song, and album, over and over again on an iPod. I remember listening to this song every single day while I commuted to work, shortly after arriving in America, and feeling “extra fly”.
• Gold on the Ceiling by The Black Keys: I love the Black Keys in general but this particular song reminds me of a time when I used to travel A LOT and I got used to falling asleep on airplanes listening to this album. The song has a soothing effect on me now, and I listen to it to zone out.

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

• The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz: I love Barry’s book for how it exposes our obsession with choice, and how it contributes to anxiety, dissatisfaction and regret. In most cases more isn’t better, it’s just… well, more. Many studies have shown that people are happier and more satisfied with their decisions when presented with fewer choices. The search for perfection is a futile exercise that will achieve little more than increase anxiety and fuel regret. So, are you a maximizer or a satisficer?
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki: James’s book is a practical exploration of the Law of Large Numbers, and demonstrates how large groups of people are better than an elite few – no matter how brilliant – at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions and even predicting the future. In the end, this book offers interesting observations on how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies and make progress in our world.
• Every book/study ever written by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, but if that sounds too overwhelming I recommend the short examination of their life-work The Undoing Projectby Michael Lewis: Danny and Amos, two Israeli psychologists, revolutionized the way we think about decision making and how we’re all tricked by “heuristic biases” into making less than optimal decisions. Their work led to paradigm shifts in the fields of psychology, military training, medicine, economics, government regulation and more, eventually earning Danny a Nobel Prize – unfortunately Amos had passed away by then.

If you could have a gigantic billboard for the world to see with anything on it, what would it say, and why? My message would be “No one is a prophet in their own land.”

Anyone who is interested in challenging the status-quo must learn to look at issues from a different angle, this is true for issues small and large. The best way to identify new opportunities is to look at how other teams, or nations, handle a particular issue. It’s very hard to see the forest for the trees if you’re too close to an issue, and you will be hard pressed to come up with out-of-the-box ideas if you don’t seek to broaden your horizons.

What are the worst recommendations or advice you have heard related to eCommerce? The worst thing I’ve heard, and continue to hear, related to ecommerce is that a brand cannot afford to focus on ecommerce because it will jeopardize its brick & mortar business. I understand how this can seem scary to a traditional CPG businesses, but ecommerce isn’t going away and it’s better to address it squarely rather than ignore it. In the end brands should be focused on their consumers and where they are, not what any particular retailer thinks. 

What advice would you give to a future leader of change about to enter business, or specifically the eCommerce field? Don’t be afraid to experiment. The great thing about ecommerce is that you can make changes and optimize your message almost instantly, and collect feedback from consumers along the way. In the digital world it’s very easy to test new content without major consequences, unlike the real world, and you can make decisions based on data as opposed to personal preferences. Thanks to the internet, brands have access to the biggest focus group imaginable at little to no cost, so embrace the medium and make experimentation a cornerstone of your marketing strategy.

What specific, industry-related change do you believe will happen that few others seem to see? I believe that some big tech companies have grown too large for the greater good and are on the verge of being restructured by the government. Some have argued that big tech is behaving much like Standard Oil did in the early 1900’s or AT&T did in the late 1970’s, meaning that they operate almost like monopolies. Yes big tech has made life easier for many of us and created a new economy that didn’t exist 25 years ago, but along the way some companies have also suppressed competition, created highly addictive products, and forced employees to work multiple low paying jobs. Congress has been grilling big tech CEO’s for a while, and the FTC has fined many companies for their bad behavior, but so far everyone has stopped short of introducing new legislation that would limit their power. This could be about to change.

What is the last thing you bought online, and why? A hair trimmer. I’ve been looking for one for a while but the physical stores around me were  wiped clean, and even online it was difficult to find one that met my criteria. The trimmers I found available online were either of lower quality, unavailable until June, or not versatile enough for my needs – don’t ask! In the end I found the one I wanted on good old Ebay. I know Ebay’s GMV has been going down over the last few years, but they’re still my go-to marketplace for hard to find items.

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First Movers is a change leader interview series featuring select industry pioneers who are boldly driving the evolution of digital commerce, the consumer and everything in between.