Future Commerce

The agency world doesn’t get enough respectAgencies are a necessary part of fractionalizing expertise. Legal and accounting are good examples of fractionalized professional services.The more mature you are as a business, the more it becomes imperative to bring those capabilities in house.Proof points of DTC brands who acquired professional services: Ro and GlossierAgencies are concentrators of expertise. Commerce platforms, like Magento, require domain expertise and platform specialization to implement — and many brands lack the ability to run this kind of operation in-house.“I don't think the agency world gets enough respect and agencies are concentrators of talent. Like they are concentrators of expertise. And the last time I looked, technologists make the decisions that create the experiences that your customers interact with.”Creating an anti-competitive ecosystem in eCommerce requires rethinking power structures. Brian recapped thoughts on this process of questioning those power structures, relating back to his Insiders piece: Rethinking Brand Power Structures“You are who you are because of the things that you've seen and the experiences you've had. That has a huge bearing on the way that we think of whatever the future is, because the future is determined by what's happened in the past”Associated Links:Check out Brian’s Insiders piece: Insiders #080: Rethinking Brand Power StructuresThe Future of Services Is Value Orchestration Let us know what you thought about the episode on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at Hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Big Pivot: From Physical Products to Headless CommerceThe core idea of the pivot from physical products to software was the basis of our piece in Insiders #070: Phenomenological Brands, which is how we booked Arfa (now Chord) to the Show.The Chord team’s background in deploying technology at Glossier informed the need for unique eCommerce experiences, and headless represents a shift from the template-driven sameness of eCommerce today, to a new limitless futureHenry breaks down a new announcement, the name change from Arfa to Chord, a stronger  focus on business software, as well as acquiring business intelligence company, Yaguara.Arfa was rated as #4 in our “Amazon Prime Challengers” category in our Spring 2020 Nine by Nine reportThe technological evolution of headless commerce allows for a fundamental revolution in direct to consumer “To make real value at some point, you’ve got to walk away from something that's worth something.” - Henry Proprietary competitive advantage is a meaningful way to make your entire business better, and what will impact everything else.“We need to move the conversation beyond build versus buy. It's really buy the right thing and then build around it. And if you can't build around it, then it's not the right thing.” - Bryan M.“Our very unique position on this is not just about headless, it's about the brain as well. Having the tools is half the battle. Knowing what to do with them is the other half. And that's our very strong position that we arrived at as operators.” - Henry Associated Links:Nine by Nine Reporthttps://chord.co/https://www.glossier.com/Let us know what you think on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at Hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Society and Audience ConnectionThere’s a difference in connection with audiences—connection through logic (written) and connection through emotion (art).On emotional connection: “...when it connects with somebody, it deepens the experience of the things you’re trying to say through words.” - Phillip JacksonLumi is a software company connecting packaging manufacturers to brands and creating lasting relationships between those brands and manufacturers. Not only has COVID-19 affected manufacturing, but there’s a generational gap between manufacturers and brands. Lumi is bridging that gap.“I feel like we’re going to be in this golden age of business as performance art, where people are doing things that don’t make sense, but they’re doing it on a large scale when it comes to marketing.” - Stephan AngoTools with Soul“How do you create, give your company a soul, give your thing that you’re doing a soul? That’s very hard. It’s like trying to define why your thing should exist…” - Stephan Ango on what his podcast, Well Made, is trying to define.Slash Packaging is a hobby project of Stephan’s—and has helped brands tell the stories around their packaging. Slash Packaging isn’t trying to be the source of innovation for packaging, but they do want to build a framework for understanding what the more sustainable options are in your industry. “I want people to learn how to think about other ways that tools can be used so that they could find creative uses of these tools to expand all of our understanding and imagination and our horizons.” - Phillip Jackson“This idea of default, the idea of sampling, the idea of ubiquity in the tools that we use has created other problems that weren’t easy to anticipate and I think harder to solve for, which leaves room for challengers.” - Phillip JacksonLinksListen to Well Made.Check out Lumi’s status tracker for their factories.Check out Slash Packaging. Have any comments or questions about this episode? Reach out to us at hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels. We love hearing from our listeners! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A perfect rating isn’t perfect. Who knew? Validation on the web has been undermined by farms and bots, and trust is harder to build than ever before. Technology can solve for some of the challenges in building trust with your customers. In this episode we dive into the the complexity of building trust, and the paradox of how running an Amazon Prime operation can help you get better at delivering in DTC. Listen now! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

🎶Let’s get personal, personal...🎶 But seriously, we have this bad habit in eCommerce to turn customers into segments and numbers and forget that they’re people. Ben Parr, President and Co-Founder of Octane AI and Jason Wong, of Doe Lashes & Wonghaus Ventures join the show to talk about making segments personal, organic, and engaging for the customer. Listen Now! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Consumers want instant gratification from their purchases and sometimes it can feel really intimidating to even try to attempt matching the expectation of 2-day shipping. But what if we told you that you can get your products to every customer in 2 days or Less? Babs King, CEO at Fleo and George Wojciechowski join the show to talk about building the process and technology to meet customer expectations. Listen Now! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Product returns can be a total pain. But what if brands used their returns to actually strengthen customer loyalty? In this episode of Step by Step, David Sobie, CEO and Co-Founder of Happy Returns and Zach Goldstein, CEO and Founder of Public Rec join the pod to chat about how returns can actually be painless for the brand and a good experience for the customer, driving their loyalty to your brand. Listen now! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

94 percent of customers will blame the retailer if the delivery of their purchase goes poorly. In this episode, Adam Gardner, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Route reveals how Route gives customers peace of mind and your brand protection in case of a shipment gone awry. Listen Now! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Thank you for being with us for 200 episodes of the Future Commerce podcast. In this episode, we look back on how we grew up from a podcast into a retail media research startup, and how building a show in 2016 led to personal and professional growth. Listen now!2016 to PresentWe launched in 2016. Our first guest was Scott Emmons and we talked about the online to offline blur in retail businesses. Every episode has been transcribed at FutureCommerce.fm. Everything we have said is searchable. “Technology adoption is always slower than you want it to be. You see potentials, you see opportunity, but it’s not really about the technology. It’s about people adopting the technology and how people use [it].” - Brian LangeIn 2018, we picked up on the coming boom in secondhand retail or “secondhand commerce.”Through 2016-2018, we had a trajectory of doing live events - eTail West, NRF, Shoptalk.On Ingrid Milman Cordy’s impact on Future Commerce: “Prior to 2019, we didn’t have consistent other voices, specifically women’s voices or younger perspectives to help us understand what other people’s points of view are and what their challenges [were].”This fed into our listener study in which we realized the future we wanted to create, a future with more equal representation: “How do we tell different stories through other people’s perspectives?” On Earth Day in 2019, we joined the Climate Neutral program and we’ve maintained the commitment for the past three years. “Most of the future of commerce is just getting data right, understanding how to interpret it, understanding when and where to surface it, understanding if it’s clean or it’s not, understanding how to get it to the point where it’s usable and actionable and has a reason to exist that is meaningful.” - Brian LangeOur most listened to episode ever (Episode 124 with Nick and Emmett from Pattern Brands) was in a pivotal moment - realizing that it’s “not just about creating things in the world, but about being able to create the world that you want to live in.” - Phillip JacksonIt was this pivot that it clicked for us that commerce has the power to change the world because it touches just about everything.In 2019, we partnered with Shopify to create a new series, Step by Step, in walking through what’s needed to know to launch and grow successful retail businesses. In 2020, we put out four reports, forty eight essays, started Stairway to CEO, and launched two newsletters.“If you had asked me in 2016 what Future Commerce was, I would have said a podcast. If you ask me in 2021 what Future commerce is, I would say we’re a media business that covers retail. We believe that we have the power with our voice to exert influence on the way that commerce is done in the world and that commerce can change the world.” - Phillip JacksonPast Episodes(7:44) Episode 53: “If god is consumerism, malls were certainly our temples. Our religion is now changing where our temple is now the internet.”(9:56) Episode 49 with Danny Sepulveda: “There is no differentiator between what we used to call the Internet economy and the regular economy. It’s just the digital economy.”(16:04) Episode 63: Deep Fakes(18:48) Episode 70: “These products take on a sort of life of their own and amplify the brand in secondary markets more than the brand could do on its own in direct to consumer.”(21:52) Episode 95 with Ingrid Milman Cordy: “Don’t buy a Lamborghini if you haven’t built the road yet.”(28:28) Episode 103 with Rachel Swanson: “You want people to feel obviously the content is relevant, but four out of five actually said that Future Commerce introduces them to new concepts and platforms that [they] wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.” (37:17) Episode 124 with Nick & Emmett from Pattern Brands: “I don’t think we’re selling a product. I think we’re selling a way to use your time.” - Nicholas Ling(41:50) Episode 132 with Matt Taylor(45:12) Season 1 of Step by Step(47:08) Episode 138 with Audrey McLoghlin: “I wanted to be able to launch a brand that speaks to what’s going on today and speaks to the customer that we would want to speak to.” (49:24) Stairway to CEO with Lee GreeneIf you have any comments or questions about this episode, you can reach out to us at hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels. We love hearing from our listeners! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.