#048 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with the great Nick Lyford @ Rembrandt Menswear. Rembradt has been in the menswear business since 1946, helping folks make a smart choice from ready-to-wear, made-to-measure, suit hire, and alteration services.

Now Marketing Manager at Rembrandt, Nick has spent time at Fishbrain, Kin, Humankind, and Rembrandt Suits. Overdose’s Jodi Irving and Nick will discuss, growth, challenges and successes, digital solutions, and ecomm trends and strategies through pandemic recovery.

#048 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with the great Nick Lyford @ Rembrandt Menswear. Rembradt has been in the menswear business since 1946, helping folks make a smart choice from ready-to-wear, made-to-measure, suit hire, and alteration services.

Now Marketing Manager at Rembrandt, Nick has spent time at Fishbrain, Kin, Humankind, and Rembrandt Suits. Overdose’s Jodi Irving and Nick will discuss, growth, challenges and successes, digital solutions, and ecomm trends and strategies through pandemic recovery.

Jim Lofgren always thought he’d be an investment banker. Disrupting those intentions, was the boss of French ecommerce giant La Redoute, who convinced Jim (who was an intern at the time) to “stick around and do some proper work.” So, he did just that—he stuck around and ended up doing 10 years in retail ecommerce, and never became a banker.

During the earlier, merchant-side phase of his career, Jim spent a couple of years at Ellos, the largest online retail group in the Nordic countries. He ran their ecommerce business and grew online sales by over 60% between 2006 and 2008.

Then, he jumped back on with La Redoute as CEO of their Nordics operation. He was 28.

A few years later, in 2010, he went stateside to the US to run OneStopPlus, the world’s largest online plus-size retailer (later rebranded to Fullbeauty.com). At the time, it was a $40 million business and Jim says they built out the marketplace using ChannelAdvisor and CommerceHub to source suppliers. The business grew to $100 million in two and a half years.

When the group was sold to private equity, Jim went into tech. He joined CommerceHub, which was primarily a drop-ship ecommerce SaaS platform based in Upstate New York.

A few years later, and now a prized Fintech leader, Jim became CEO of Klarna, North America, in 2015. The Swedish startup had only entered the US market the year before but globally was already on course to become one of the most disruptive and promising of its breed in the explosive buy-now-pay-later space.

But, in those early days, Jim explains, buy-now-pay-later products hadn’t come yet to the US, “so we were really just trying to use credit instruments to optimize and improve the checkout conversion.”

Jim initially ran a team from San Francisco managing large global accounts—multinationals like H&M, IKEA, and Ticketmaster. “We built this product where they could integrate with Klarna once but get access to 10 markets of credit issuing and that was very attractive from a large multinational perspective, so we saw huge traction with that.”

Two years later, Jim also became CEO of Klarna’s North American division and it was at this time he says they had to pivot—when they saw what was going on in Australia with Afterpay. Klarna started building out the ‘Pay in 4’ product.

It was in midst of its product launch when Jim first met with Nostos’ three co-founders at Shoptalk. They kept calling him, and by mid-2018, Jim had transitioned from CEO of Klarna, North America to CEO of Nosto.

When Jim joined Nosto in 2018, the company was filled with an ambition to influence and change the ecommerce experience into something far more individual, tailored, and relevant to shoppers. Changing the norm from ‘one-to-all’ to ‘one-to-few’ or ‘one-to-one’ was a founding mechanism for Nosto.

He says there was a decision not to be a point solution anymore and they needed to figure out a much broader experience for merchants. Nosto began building solutions to take over the whole onsite experience­—from the content that is shown on a landing page to all the single pieces of real estate on the PDP, to the category pages, to the ranking of the product on the onsite experience.

He explains the aim is to enable retailers to be able to optimise everything from a one-to-one and one-to-few perspective while overlaying business goals, such as growth, or more specifically increasing AOV, or optimizing for conversion or margin, or product rank, and so forth.

It’s a level of tailoring designed to be specific to the shopper; showing that shopper or segment of users only what they consistently buy. For example, those who always buy new arrivals are shown new arrivals on the landing page—not the sales section or the sales banner; or people who always buy men’s, should only be shown men’s; or new visitors should be given a different experience than repeat visitors.

The key to this, Jim explains, is the algorithmic experience that has to be built out on all of the touchpoints, and the beauty of it, he says, is everything gathered from the core data can then be exported to other components, such as the ESP, or to an advertising platform, integrating the whole, broader experience.

Partner ecosystem – Nosto have always had a partner-first mentality. It’s said a tech is only as good as its partner ecosystem—you need to be able to get data easily from a technology into the rest of your tech stack.

The people – It’s also said that a tech is only as good as the people that support it. Nosto have always held up their technology with an incredible team, some of the best in the industry.

The talented people of Nosto seem to always stick around too. In an industry where people move on every year—or sooner—rotating from tech to tech, to agency, to merchant, and so on, Nosto bucks the trend. The longer-held positions create a wonderful sense of stability that’s not always seen across the ecosystem.

The culture – Jim credits the founders as responsible for building the “friendliest culture he’s ever encountered.” He says there are no politics, just an enviable sense of purpose and professionalism.  Along the way, there have been certain ‘company legends’ who have helped set the tone for what the organisation wants to be and help build the culture. Jim says he’s grateful for all of those people who’ve done all of the hard work: “I need to try to foster and keep it. I almost feel like I inherited a really good thing, I just need to make sure I keep it and I keep it moving forward.”

From the outside looking in, Andrew says he sees a remarkable level of professional growth of the people there. Even those who have moved on seem to always carry a place in their heart for Nosto, like an old flame.

There’s a current push in ecommerce towards adding more features and creating a more robust solution—­­being able to service more areas of the website. Andrew and Jim agree it’s cyclical: where once upon a time, every ecomm platform wanted to be everything to everyone, all of a sudden it changed­­ when there was a realisation other providers could do parts of the ecosystem better. Merchants started to shop around: ‘I need that, I want that, that’s better than what I have.’ They found options (like the Nostos and the Yotpos) that are better for certain features and functionality than the core platform itself.

Then, fast forward three years, merchants have ended up with 35 or 40 vendors for their tech stack. Too many single-spot solutions. So, the cycle starts over again and there’s a move back towards an offering with more robust features, back to the ‘fewer vendors who do more and do it better’ direction.

So how does this play out for Nosto? Jim says his biggest fear, and what they talk about a lot, is if they can’t expand the product or if the solution they’re building is not best-of-breed in its segment. He says he’d rather not build something if he can’t honestly say it’s better than what’s available because “I’m going to be attacked by another best-of-breed solution,” he says. “And if I have only one module inside the platform, that’s worse than the best-of-breed solution, it puts the whole Nosto relationship with the client in danger.” It’s an inordinately high benchmark.

And, as they broaden, there’s the added challenge of an increased level of technical support needed from engineering and product staff. Jim says there’s a lot of work to do to ensure the team knows the product well enough and can talk to it.

There’s also a cautionary approach required to navigate the politics in the ecosystem—broadening their offering comes with the risk of ruining relationships: “If we do this, are we going to blow up a partnership we have with a technology that does something similar?” It’s a balancing act.

The emergence of the trend towards composable headless architecture could also restrict a return to an all-in-one solution because the nature of headless is being able to take third-party tech and plug it into the tech stack, rather than having an all-in-one platform technology.

Jim says they noticed the trend a few years back and prepared for it early. They started creating GraphQL API-type integrations for clients going headless, but it had a sluggish uptake. “We built it out, we had it ready to go, but not too many merchants were using it.” But now, over the last year, he says they’re seeing a migration of larger customers and retailers implementing it: “They’re going quite aggressively from a Shopify Plus, more standardised integration, to using us for GraphQL and APIs.”

Overall, the broader platform approach of Nosto doesn’t really change, Jim explains: “Because you still need someone to use machine learning tech and algorithmically re-rank the products in the category tree and retrieve the behavioural data, the image data, apply the machine learning, and send back the re-rankings. Or, for example, to do the recommendations on the product detail page or category pages, or to provide the out-of-the-box ML-based segments that you can use in your banners. You still need that.”

Jim says the most important benefit of headless is the speed of it. He says the single page application (SPA) version of headless is where it gets the most interesting—the speed of site reloads and the experience that you can have on mobile, for example, is what really counts for consumers.

Jim sees marketing automation as moving in a direction where SMS and ESPs are largely one dimension, and the on-site experience (with search, merchandising, and recommendations) is another. He says at some point those two areas will start to merge, but not for now.

“It’s about defining where your core data sits. Does it sit in your CRM?, ESP?, CDP? Does it sit with the behavioural data and segmentation and one-to-one image metadata? It’s deciding where you start the configuration of your customer experience.”  He says once you decide and lean into something, then you need to make sure you can export and import data from whatever system you have so that you can have a much more holistic experience for the end consumer.”

Big news of late around ecomm circles was Nosto’s acquisition of content marketing startup Stackla.

Australian-originated Stackla is one of the most advanced solutions in the UGC space, primarily visual UGC. It’s a platform that enables brands and retailers to search the social channels for content about their brand and then request the rights to use that user-generated content in their own channels, as a delivery mechanism—whether it’s back into social or on the website or with an ESP or CRM or a loyalty programme.

For Nosto, the acquisition is about realising their ambition to be the technology that provides the most authentic experience possible. “As online shopping accelerates and we crave human connection, consumers increasingly seek the real and relevant user-generated content they trust to help them make purchasing decisions,” he explains. “At the same time, brands are struggling to create enough engaging and diverse content to deliver the types of authentic, personalized experiences consumers expect.”

“The pairing of Stackla’s unrivalled UGC platform with Nosto’s leading commerce experience platform aims to solve this problem for brands; giving brands the ability to create more meaningful shopping experiences.”

With visual UGC, such as imagery or TikTok galleries, the engagement on that content is almost 10 times higher than on branded content. The engagement is just there without the need to have a transactional relationship.

Jim says Stackla’s product blew them away completely. And then, they were blown away by the team. “An Australian-founded company, fantastic people,” he says. “We fell in love with the people after having fallen in love with the product and we decided to do something together that’s bigger than what we are doing now.”

Integration and roll-out are underway and Jim says they want to go to market with something that is really interesting for new clients but also creates a clear benefit for their existing base of loyal customers.

Nosto’s vision to provide a true brand experience has become even more real as they add the Stackla UGC string to their bow. In their pursuit to provide authenticity, it’s hard not to notice that that very authenticity already exists, intrinsically, at Nosto, within its people, and its leader.

#048 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with the great Nick Lyford @ Rembrandt Menswear. Rembradt has been in the menswear business since 1946, helping folks make a smart choice from ready-to-wear, made-to-measure, suit hire, and alteration services.

Now Marketing Manager at Rembrandt, Nick has spent time at Fishbrain, Kin, Humankind, and Rembrandt Suits. Overdose’s Jodi Irving and Nick will discuss, growth, challenges and successes, digital solutions, and ecomm trends and strategies through pandemic recovery.

Those first big rounds of capital raising in 2018 were followed by an IPO in August 2020, and it’s been an era of meteoric growth for BigCommerce. They’ve released a lot of new functionality and have hired over one hundred employees globally.

Keith, who’s been in the agency ecosystem for five years (starting at Mercutio, which merged into the Overdose family in June 2021), says BigCommerce initially came along and filled a gap in the market—a need for a SaaS platform that worked across both mid-market and enterprise clients. Other providers weren’t really looking at B2B; manufacturers selling at the mid-market company level were left high and dry—they were maybe too large or too complex for industry go-to, Shopify. And they weren’t being looked after by the top end of town—the true enterprise platforms. BigCommerce stepped in as a really good solution for that mid-market service. 

Fast-forward to today, and BigCommerce is considered one of the top players within the industry across most sectors.

Creating and coining the concept of open SaaS also contributed to BigCommerce’s spectacular rise, Jonny says. He explains how three years ago, brands with sufficient complexity or scale felt their only option was to go with open source. “They didn’t feel like being fit into this little box of software-as-a-service, whereas open source gave them the flexibility and the extensibility that they needed to be able to compete online.”

When a new CEO took to the helm, they launched ‘the enterprise project’ to build out a new type of platform offering the best of true multi-tenant software-as-a-service. It was designed to combine all the usual suspects, like automatic upgrades and updates, and PCI compliance and hosting, but offer it alongside the best of open source—tons of native functionality right out of the box. Jonny explains: “The ability on the front end to either go full bore with Stencil, our design framework, or completely rip and replace it, and look something else, but then opening up the whole platform via API end-points.” And it enabled integration with other solutions on the back end to facilitate specific workflows.

It was a big play for BigCommerce; it was how they positioned themselves for the huge uptake across SMB, mid-market, and even up into the enterprise space.

As the size of BigCommerce’s customers increased, contract value accordingly rose. Jonny says when he started in 2018, if they closed up a $1,500 a month contract, it was a big deal, but now, working on a $20K a month merchant contract is not uncommon. 

In other words, things have changed A LOT.

Jonny explains the BigCommerce pricing model is based on annual order volume and average order value—it varies a lot depending on how many orders and what the order value looks like. “It’s not purely a take rate of GMV like it is for some of the other platforms we compete with.”

To put the size of customer in perspective, Jonny says roughly speaking a merchant at $5 million GMV (gross merchandise value) online annually could be expecting to pay anywhere between $1,500 and $2,500 a month for BigCommerce. Extrapolating from that you can see how the size of the $20K a month BigCommerce spend is going to be a far more significantly-sized company—mid-market to enterprise—now a firm sweet spot for BigCommerce.

After their IPO which raised $260 million, there’s been a fair bit of spending planning at BigCommerce—figuring out the best use of the cash to grow the business.

International expansion was high on the agenda and they successfully launched into the Netherlands, France, and Italy. The process involved translating the control panel into those local languages to make it easier for merchants and partners, as well as onboarding a number of local support staff in those regions.

It’s impossible to steer clear of mentioning the Covid-effect in ecommerce discussions—dealing with ‘the new normal’ has also been a huge play for BigCommerce in its new growth phase. The pandemic has fundamentally affected the way consumers shop online and shop in general. “We’re talking to our merchants every single day and trying to figure out not just what our strategy should be for our own dot-com, but realising it needs to be much more holistic than that. We need to understand, ‘What is our full omni strategy going to be across digital and physical together, and how do those work together?’”

Pre-Covid, brands may have been a little lackadaisical about what their digital strategy and omni strategy was, before realising how hamstrung they were when the pandemic hit. It ended up being a case of pulling all the levers to see which ones would drive revenue and drive orders. A better approach, Jonny says, is to figure out ‘nuts and bolts’—like what the full digital strategy is to be.

Even as people are largely able to get back into physical stores, it’s really interesting to see that the Covid-induced rise of online shopping hasn’t abated. 

Many online merchants are still seeing Covid-driven sales level increases which are not reaching the expected plateau, even as lockdowns end and freedom-to-move resumes. Those trends, like shopping from our phones, haven’t gone away.

We now begin to consider if there’s ingrained behaviour resulting from the forced use of ecommerce over the past year or so. The question is, will there be a natural retraction and shift back to bricks and mortar?

For a Global Digital Commerce Agency who works with an array of clients across manufacturing, B2B, and B2C, some with bricks and mortar, Keith says Overdose is anticipating the natural rise of organic traffic to be either a wave or a plateau. “If it’s a wave, it’s going to crest at some point and retract—and sales and everything goes with it. If it’s a plateau, then it becomes a building block for future growth.” So, perhaps the best approach, for now, is to do whatever you can in the short term to create personalised experiences, foster customer lifetime value, embolden your mobile experiences, and capture information.

In terms of capturing information, there’s a bit to bear in mind with regards to the new data protection and privacy features such as ETP and ITP, but it’s an ongoing shift that needs to be dealt with.

Providing better B2B CX – There’s the new generation of younger B2B buyers entering the workforce, and they expect B2C-esque experiences when they buy product.

One of BigCommerce’s strategic focuses, from a product perspective, over the last couple of years has been on all things multi. First, they released a multi-currency feature and all its associated functionality. Now, they’re in beta with multi-store and multi-location inventory, and have a multi-language feature coming soon.

“If you’re a merchant that needs a lot of the multi-esque functionality, there are ways to do it on BigCommerce that are still pretty elegant,” Jonny says, “but you’re always going to have merchants out there that want it to be native and out-of-the-box.” He says, in the past, merchants have felt like they’ve had to hack things together to make it work for them, and BigCommerce’s aim is to solve these problems natively.

Keith agrees multi is a big deal, especially for the manufacturer side and the larger clients. He says Overdose has “worked on some really interesting solutions, such as utilising a very slick PWA tool that gives the ability to serve multiple domains off a single instance of both Deity and BigCommerce. “The integration that we have with BigCommerce is outstanding because it’s pulling over product taxonomy and a bunch of other stuff natively.”

The multi approach is paying off for BigCommerce with some great outcomes already.

Another way BigCommerce is steering in the upwards direction is through their ongoing updates to Stencil. Keith points out this is particularly useful in SEO and with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). The ADA is now a key component of design, and it’s really important to make sure templates are built accordingly.

For the Overdose agency, “Each of the Stencil releases are useful because they cut down dev time on implementation,” says Keith, “ which means less work we have to do, and we can focus elsewhere.”

With iOS 15 on the horizon, and the new cookie issues surrounding it, there’s a new frontier in ecommerce marketing. With the new operating system set to strip cookies from emails within its Mail app, as well as hide IP address tracking within Mail and Safari, the ability to track open rates will be lost, threatening the efficacy of campaigns.

“It’s all par for the ever-changing course,” says Keith. “Years ago, we were super worried about mobile and ‘How are people going to shop on mobile?’ Well, everybody worked really hard and we got it done and now we have good mobile experiences. This won’t be any different, but it’ll be that ongoing shift that we have to deal with.”

There’s still the first-party data card to play which requires merchants and agencies to up the ante with personalised engagement. It requires extra marketing time—precious time Overdose may just have, thanks to their ecomm platform, BigCommerce, knocking it out of the park.

#048 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with the great Nick Lyford @ Rembrandt Menswear. Rembradt has been in the menswear business since 1946, helping folks make a smart choice from ready-to-wear, made-to-measure, suit hire, and alteration services.

Now Marketing Manager at Rembrandt, Nick has spent time at Fishbrain, Kin, Humankind, and Rembrandt Suits. Overdose’s Jodi Irving and Nick will discuss, growth, challenges and successes, digital solutions, and ecomm trends and strategies through pandemic recovery.

#048 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with the great Nick Lyford @ Rembrandt Menswear. Rembradt has been in the menswear business since 1946, helping folks make a smart choice from ready-to-wear, made-to-measure, suit hire, and alteration services.

Now Marketing Manager at Rembrandt, Nick has spent time at Fishbrain, Kin, Humankind, and Rembrandt Suits. Overdose’s Jodi Irving and Nick will discuss, growth, challenges and successes, digital solutions, and ecomm trends and strategies through pandemic recovery.

#048 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with the great Nick Lyford @ Rembrandt Menswear. Rembradt has been in the menswear business since 1946, helping folks make a smart choice from ready-to-wear, made-to-measure, suit hire, and alteration services.

Now Marketing Manager at Rembrandt, Nick has spent time at Fishbrain, Kin, Humankind, and Rembrandt Suits. Overdose’s Jodi Irving and Nick will discuss, growth, challenges and successes, digital solutions, and ecomm trends and strategies through pandemic recovery.

#002 : NZ Muscle retails high-quality nutritional supplements, health foods, vitamins, weight loss products, clothing, accessories, and sports equipment; all sourced from across the globe and available from a gym, four retail stores located across Auckland, and via an online shop to consumers throughout New Zealand.  The company caters to male and female customers of all shapes and sizes; from the hardcore bodybuilder to the everyday gym-goer, and is proud to be an organic New Zealand retailer.

When Dion Roosenbrand was a student and spending a lot of his time working out at the gym with friends, he realised that there was a limited choice of sports supplements available locally. From sourcing international products for his own personal use, the idea grew that the NZ gym community might also be interested in a better choice of products.  He was right, and the company that he started operating out of his parent’s garage in 2006 has since grown to be the NZ Muscle brand that we know today with four stores across Auckland.

NZ Muscle has experienced steady growth over the past fourteen years; expanding from a couple of garage shelves where a restricted line of products was stored, to its current position with four retail stores, a gym, and 1,800 square meters of warehouse which is required to supply the huge online market that wants to buy everything that the brand has to offer.   The team too has grown, and their CEO is noticeably proud, describing them as “motivated and passionate individuals” who each have an interest in training, exercise, or supplements.

The company has been sourcing and formulating its own products for a number of years, all of which have recently benefited from a logo refresh, which has further enhanced their visual appeal.  As protein is a consumable commodity, Dion’s buying power increases with large orders which enables him to price his own products more competitively. While there is the potential to wholesale these home-grown products in the future, they will continue to be an exclusive NZ Muscle offering in the medium term.

Four years ago, Dion acquired the Shotgun Supplements brand, which he quickly integrated into the Muscle brand to ensure that all site traffic and customer data was managed efficiently from one central location. The main day-to-day business for all online products is managed from the NZ Muscle website, while bulk orders and special promotions can be found on their WheyDeals sister website.

Dion agrees that the company benefits very much from brand loyalty, which he feels is driven firstly by the quality of the products sold to the niche health and fitness community and also the fact the New Zealanders are extremely proactive in supporting home-grown businesses.  This he intends to build upon in future by broadening Muscle’s online offering and possibly extending delivery to the Australian market.

As was the case for many businesses deemed to be “non-essential,” the company reluctantly had to shut up shop during the Covid-19 lockdown.  When online sales dwindled to zero, Dion responded by marketing a huge online sale with a promise to ship items immediately after lock-down.  This generated much-needed revenue while the brick and mortar shops and gym remained closed and also provided a positive focus for the team when they were able to return to the warehouse.  With the immediate future looking uncertain for retail stores and gyms, the company’s current focus is very much on ecommerce.

NZ Muscle promotes its products by regularly exposing the brand to its target audience via influencers who personally use the products and are genuinely passionate about them.  While not entirely quantifiable, Dion feels that this modern marketing approach definitely contributes to revenue by consistently maintaining the brand’s visibility to a wide audience across social media.

The team at NZ Muscle partnered with Overdose over the last few years to develop an integrated, omnichannel digital offering initially on Magento 1, and subsequently Magento 2 in 2020. NZ Muscle aspires to deliver an intuitive, personalized shopping experience for their disconcerting and loyal customers across channels, whilst continuing to test and refine new innovative ecommerce models, brands, and offerings.

The NZ Muscle site is integrated with Vend for the bidirectional flow of inventory, product, and pricing data, and boasts a handful of selected plugins to aid user experience and accelerate the path to purchase. The site leverages Nosto to produce AI-generated product recommendations with cross-selling and up-selling optimization, advanced search and merchandise capabilities through the implementation of Algolia, and integrated reviews and UGC through Stamped.

#048 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with the great Nick Lyford @ Rembrandt Menswear. Rembradt has been in the menswear business since 1946, helping folks make a smart choice from ready-to-wear, made-to-measure, suit hire, and alteration services.

Now Marketing Manager at Rembrandt, Nick has spent time at Fishbrain, Kin, Humankind, and Rembrandt Suits. Overdose’s Jodi Irving and Nick will discuss, growth, challenges and successes, digital solutions, and ecomm trends and strategies through pandemic recovery.

#048 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with the great Nick Lyford @ Rembrandt Menswear. Rembradt has been in the menswear business since 1946, helping folks make a smart choice from ready-to-wear, made-to-measure, suit hire, and alteration services.

Now Marketing Manager at Rembrandt, Nick has spent time at Fishbrain, Kin, Humankind, and Rembrandt Suits. Overdose’s Jodi Irving and Nick will discuss, growth, challenges and successes, digital solutions, and ecomm trends and strategies through pandemic recovery.

#048 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with the great Nick Lyford @ Rembrandt Menswear. Rembradt has been in the menswear business since 1946, helping folks make a smart choice from ready-to-wear, made-to-measure, suit hire, and alteration services.

Now Marketing Manager at Rembrandt, Nick has spent time at Fishbrain, Kin, Humankind, and Rembrandt Suits. Overdose’s Jodi Irving and Nick will discuss, growth, challenges and successes, digital solutions, and ecomm trends and strategies through pandemic recovery.