#044 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with legend Ryan Powell @ Whiplash Fulfillment (formerly Port Logistics Group). Senior Vice President of eCommerce at Whiplash, Ryan is a logistics powerhouse with a wealth of knowledge in the space.

Overdose’s Andrew Potkewitz and Ryan will discuss checkout/fulfilment tech, 3PLs, last-mile, free delivery, next/2nd day delivery, and the value-add services that are on the rise.

#044 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with legend Ryan Powell @ Whiplash Fulfillment (formerly Port Logistics Group). Senior Vice President of eCommerce at Whiplash, Ryan is a logistics powerhouse with a wealth of knowledge in the space.

Overdose’s Andrew Potkewitz and Ryan will discuss checkout/fulfilment tech, 3PLs, last-mile, free delivery, next/2nd day delivery, and the value-add services that are on the rise.

Ali Afzalirad is without a doubt a stalwart of ecommerce. His career almost spans the entire tech industry’s evolution, beginning back in the dark ages some twenty years ago.  It’s a trajectory that has seen him dabble in everything from deep tech, to early applications, to agency, and onto SaaS—the space where he happily sits now as VP Enterprise Sales at BigCommerce.

He cut his teeth, back in the day, working for a company licensing software technology to device manufacturers. It was software development and a lot of source code. He was in sales, but there was nothing to demo.

“We sold real-time operating systems and protocol stacks to companies that were making devices.” There was all manner of devices: early cellphones, set-top boxes, digital cameras, and personal assistant devices (remember Palm Pilot?). Also networking equipment, like routers and switches, and avionics, such as ground proximity radar warning systems.

Then, one day, he heard about this thing called ecommerce.

The story Ali tells is that he was asked by a colleague, one of the SE (solution engineers), for a favour: “Hey, I know this guy who runs the SE team at ATG. It’s in this thing called ecommerce. Can you be a reference?”

Ali agreed: “Sure. I’ll be a reference for you. But, hey, what exactly is ecommerce?”

“Selling stuff online.”

While Ali was on the phone providing the reference, the recruiter offered him a job too.

“So that’s how I got hired by ATG,” he says. “I didn’t know the first thing about ecommerce, or customer service or customer experience, I just fell into it at that point in time.”

At ATG, Ali immersed himself in the learning experience and the role really suited him. “I loved being out of the deep-tech side and being more application. And it was a breath of fresh air to be able to have something to demo and to pitch to business users and IT, not just the developers in the room.”

Not long after Ali found his niche at ATG, it was acquired by Oracle. Ali describes how it was a case of “the little fish gets swallowed by the big fish and the culture changes, the focus changes.”

The sales structure was very different, he explains. “Big companies obviously go to market very differently than little companies. There’s typically a matrix sales organisation. You’ve got product specialists supporting a primary rep that has a certain subset of accounts. You go from geographies to account-based. You might have vertical teams that pitch in retail, FinTech, etc.”

Initially, there was a transition period where he says it still felt the same, and he had the same ATG crew around him. Then, the fiscal year turned and the very next day he was told, “You have a new assignment. Show up to Atlanta on Wednesday, you’re going to meet your new manager.”

“Boom. My world changed overnight,” says Ali. “I was made a prime rep, was given a subset of accounts and I sold customer experience. I had several different solutions in the bag that I could sell, and I just didn’t love it.”

Enter the next phase in Ali’s career. Opportunity came knocking: A friend of his was being courted by a consulting company, Optaros, to run sales, and she begged him to go too. Before he knew it, he was on a plane to Boston for an interview—which ended up being a here’s-your-offer-letter-interview, rather than an actual interview.

Ali tells of how, to sweeten the deal, they were taken to a New England seafood outlet where five two-pound lobsters were packaged up in a to-go box, along with a couple of quarts of frozen clam chowder, all put in a cooler which he had to take as carry-on on the flight back home. “So, I’ve got lobsters clawing on the Styrofoam and I get home, make the lobsters, and the family is like, ‘You’d better take that job because we want more lobsters.’”

The lure of the lobster aside, Ali revered his time at Optaros, where he was Director of Sales, “It was fantastic. We implemented Hybris, Demandware, and Magento. And all of them before they were acquired by the bigger companies that own them now. It was a new time.”

While at Optaros, and working with Magento, he met the new channel manager who was going to take over the Optaros account, Rachel Pfeffer (now of Gorgias fame).

He recalls “Rachel was asking me questions about how we’re going to work together and establish our cadence, and I was just thinking, ‘I’m probably going to be working with you over there. I just talked to who will be my manager pretty soon. I think the offer is coming.’”

Sure enough, before long, he jumped on board with Magento. When he got there, it was all ‘Go.’ “I arrived shortly after M2 came out, and Primera spun Magento out or basically bought it from the eBay enterprise days, and they spun out GSI Commerce or that piece of eBay enterprise to what is now Radial. And then we got spun out to Magento commerce, and Primera put, I don’t know, a couple hundred million bucks’ investment in the company. And it just took off like a rocket ship, it was a fun time.”

As we know, Magento was subsequently acquired by Adobe (and in 2021 was renamed Adobe Commerce).

With his penchant for progressive business, it’s no surprise that Ali moved over to BigCommerce in March 2020. He says he was drawn to the ecomm powerhouse for several reasons:

One, because it’s a SaaS platform. Ali could see the sea-of-change towards SaaS: “I was seeing the shift in the market where people don’t want to own the core-code of the commerce platform and are willing to sacrifice some flexibility to have that ease-of-use, ease of maintenance, not having to deal with core-code.”

Secondly, Ali had his radar on for a business that would go public. “I had the sense from the CEO around strategy that he wanted to go public more than he wanted to be acquired.” And it has—BigCommerce’s IPO was announced in July 2020.

Also, he was attracted to BigCommerce’s technology and inherent flexibility; as well as the fact it’s a company solely focused on ecommerce.

BigCommerce was very early into what is now known as the ‘headless game’—no longer just a buzzword, it’s a super trend in ecomm.

With a headless commerce platform, the front-end delivery layer (or the ‘head’)—which in most cases is a template or theme—has been decoupled and removed, leaving only the back-end infrastructure. Headless is a gamechanger because of the unbridled flexibility it allows the brand in the creation of their websites, and, importantly, it enables brands to enrich the customer experience.

BigCommerce provides an API-driven approach (API acts as a bridge between the front-end and back-end by decoupling them from each other), giving the option of going headless. “This is a world where people want choice,” Ali says. “They may need to have some things owned by the commerce platform, but the commerce platform owns the glass. Or it may be an area of the site, or the CMS, or it’s a custom front-end, and we’re just feeding the commerce capabilities there.”

Ali explains that typically the headless approach suits the more mature, larger brands—they can provide the level of support needed. But he sees some smaller brands that are also suited to headless. “An example is Yeti Cycles. They’re a customer of ours that has a beautiful headless site. They’re not selling just any ordinary bicycle. These are amazing bikes. And when you go to the site, it’s a very immersive experience, it doesn’t look like your traditional web store out of the box.”

“They’re a business without a large catalog, and they don’t do a lot of promotions, so they’re not making a ton of changes to the site on a frequent basis—it’s more the experience that really matters. It’s more about educating the consumer on the bikes they have, on their brand, and really competing against the other bikes and brands in the market.”

“If your experience is what you’re selling on, and maybe you’re a digitally native brand to start out with, it might be the right play for you to go headless.”

Headless is not for everyone and many businesses need a tightly coupled ecommerce platform with its own theming, framework, or head, where the software provider ‘owns the glass.’

BigCommerce continues to invest substantially in the traditional, ‘monolithic’ approach. Recent enhancements to their themes include adding feature functionality, improving the speed of their themes, and they have recently released support for accessibility in the WCAG standard. They also recently added a page-builder, a drop-and-drag WYSIWYG editor, and more.

Subscription, spurred on by the pandemic, is another current craze in ecomm. “There are tons of opportunities around subscription,” says Ali. “I think everyone’s moved their own business to some sort of subscription service, no matter who it is.”

And it seems he’s right—subscriptions are everywhere and range from a monthly grilled-cheese subscription to a cloud subscription where the National Cloud Society email a daily picture of a cloud (the physical, up-in-the-sky kind). Farcical as it may sound, it’s a serious thing—supposedly a cathartic experience.

“I think this whole AR/VR thing is pretty cool,” Ali says referring to AR ‘augmented reality’ and VR ‘virtual reality’ technologies.

Increasingly used in the furniture, art, and fashion industries, AR and AV enhance the user experience by enabling customers to virtually try the product on, or see it on the wall in their living room.

AR/VR software also has huge appeal for B2B. “When B2B companies really start using the tools that are out there for B2C merchants, like the ability to take an automotive part, spin it around and look at it and see it from all angles—it’s is another level of providing a better experience,” says Ali.

BigCommerce has a partnership with Threekit, a leading platform in the AR/AV space.

Today, to be competitive, it’s almost essential to have a multi-channel approach for your brand, including social media. Platforms like BigCommerce serve as the hub to push out products to all channels, and they work hard establishing tight integrations with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon. “We’ve improved our ability to serve our customers and give them the ability to syndicate their products on the different channels and sell across those channels,” explains Ali.

He says the bigger brands were once choosing to use platforms like ChannelAdvisor or Feedonomics, rather than a commerce platform, but now there’s a shift with those larger brands wanting to manage their channels from the core commerce platform.

Andrew agrees there’s a shift in merchants requiring channel management. “We used to hear about CDPs and PIMs and DAMs only once in a while,” he says. “And now, it’s at least discussed—it’s asked about by the merchant, it’s asked about by tech partners.”

Ali says there’s another new frontier with consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies eager to try out ecommerce in the direct-to-consumer channel. It makes sense with a SaaS platform, like BigCommerce, where they can “test and learn and spin up a site really quickly, deploy it in a matter of weeks”—to see if it’s going to work for that particular brand before investing a lot of money.

B2B brands traditionally know very little about their end-consumer, so direct-to-consumer provides a way for a brand to get to know and understand their consumers.

“You may do focus groups, where you try and figure it out. But unless you’re selling directly to them, you don’t really ever get the data,” says Ali.

It’s transformative for these brands to now be learning about their consumers—they can gain insights to help them with product development, with distribution, with understanding what part of the country they should be selling in, what products and which warehouse they should be resourcing from, and so forth.

One of the challenges, however, is getting the companies to invest adequately. “There are multi-billion-dollar brands selling to the big box retailers and they have zero relationship with their customers and when they finally turn the corner to invest in an ecommerce channel, it’s astounding how little they want to spend.”

“The end goal is not necessarily to do hundreds of millions through your ecomm channel. It’s more about the insights, having that relationship. So that, this two, three, four, five million or $10 million ecommerce site you have influences the billions of dollars you generate through your other channels. That’s what you’re really talking about here.”

With every challenge there is opportunity. And we know that for these businesses yet to tap into their full ecomm potential, there’s a powerful big commerce business ready to welcome them to the party.

#044 : On this episode of Chill, we’ll chat with legend Ryan Powell @ Whiplash Fulfillment (formerly Port Logistics Group). Senior Vice President of eCommerce at Whiplash, Ryan is a logistics powerhouse with a wealth of knowledge in the space.

Overdose’s Andrew Potkewitz and Ryan will discuss checkout/fulfilment tech, 3PLs, last-mile, free delivery, next/2nd day delivery, and the value-add services that are on the rise.

she wear is Australia’s only functional work footwear company focusing solely on the needs of women. Founded by Stacey Head after a nail-in-the-foot incident made her question why there were no suitable safety boots in the marketplace to keep her protected while she worked. It was 2011, and she was on the tools in her property development business. The only boots available were unisex, and consequently, heavy and ill-fitting.

Within a couple of years, Stacey had stepped in and created she wear, bucking the industry standard where women were forced into men’s shoes. She started small, literally on a shoe-string, offering just two styles in three colours, but they took off and she ran out of stock.

The concept in place, it was then onto the hard yards­­—research, due diligence, customer feedback, and design development­­—all the layers needed to grow the business; all dedicated to the presiding mission to ensure women have correctly fitted, safe, and comfortable workwear.

Now, she wear is a fully-fledged, burgeoning business with a growing catalogue retailing a large range of workwear and PPE for women across countless industries—health, retail, education, hospitality, trades, mining, and so forth.

As founder and managing director, Stacey oversees company operations including design, R&D, manufacturing, importing, exporting, wholesale, retail, sales and marketing, and business operations.

When Stacey started she wear seven years ago, she says it was a pretty solo and lonely journey. Mentors weren’t around. Incubator hubs weren’t around. There were no business grants.

So, instead, she just talked to women. She did her research and due diligence by speaking to the people that needed the boots. She had much to learn—from the ground up, “I had to teach myself Australian standards and compliance, let alone what makes a good shoe.”

In the early days, Stacey says the business was really a hobby, a side hustle for her to get a little bit of cash in. Then, after ten months, a couple of rounds of prototypes, visiting factories, figuring out standards and compliance, and going through audits, the hobby went to market as a home-based startup.

One of the few plans she had in place was the sales channel—it was always going to be a direct-to-consumer business. To this day, it remains largely a D2C digital-based business.

A lucky break came about three months after she wear had launched—the boots were worn by the female contestants of The Block. Everything changed. They had to move very quickly into a commercial premise, and they ran out of boots within a couple of months. “I guess it was a forced journey rather than a planned journey and I’ve certainly learned a lot along the way about not having systems in place and processes. It was a bit of a wild ride if I’m being honest.”

As she wear took off, it became evident that there was an unintended consequence embedded in the business idea. The notion of female empowerment was not front-of-mind when Stacey sought to supply the gap in the market—but it was there by default.

By building a women’s product that helps women doing physical work, or keeps them safe, or even the mere fact that the product acknowledges women have roles in certain male-dominated fields, it became a quest for equality.

“I think it’s still phenomenal that the world is still not really putting women as a focus. They say that the world is made for men and I don’t want to take that gender arm, but a classic example is the NASA space suits a few years ago—crash test dummies are generally men and women get more harmed and hurt in accidents.”

Stacey finds it hard to believe that women’s workwear wasn’t even considered by the bigger brands. “I’m a huge believer in equality. I think if a woman wants to be whatever she wants to be, she should be given that opportunity. She should be given the correct fitting and safe and comfortable footwear, workwear, PPE—whatever it might be. We have to cater for every need and every want and every foot type and every body shape.”

As she wear has grown, the empowering women ethos has cemented. “I think it’s really important that we showcase women,” Stacey says. “We have really good conversation and lots of networking with our customers and they share their stories.”

“So many of our customers are in roles that you don’t even know exist or don’t think it’s possible to go into that avenue. I think it’s really important that people can see others—there are some pretty amazing women out there and I love showcasing that. That’s one of my favorite parts of our brand.”

But it’s been challenging to get women to talk. Stacey says they often don’t want to tell their stories—by nature, women aren’t comfortable with talking about themselves. She says the same goes for her—she’d much prefer to be behind the wheel pushing it than talking about her own journeys.

As hard as it may be for Stacey to be in the limelight, she knows she’s playing an important role by showcasing and empowering women through she wear.

“The beauty of being able to shine a light on these industries is that companies are coming on board and giving women specific-fit clothing and footwear.”

And it’s not just in the retail sector, other organisations, too, are embracing change. The Motor Trades Association of Queensland, for example, is launching a new course specifically for women.

“It’s creating a safe space,” she says. “It’s not to counteract the men in the industry, it’s more the fact that there are all these statistics around women not feeling safe when they’re one-of, in a group of a hundred. So, it’s great to see change there as well.”

There’s still a long way to go. In trades and construction, for example, on average 2% are women—which is a tiny percentage, but, importantly, it’s increasing.

Stacey was really a pioneer of a segment. She was the first to notice there was a gap in the market and the first to fill it. At the time, other workwear brands—even huge brands that had been in the industry for 20, 30, or 150 years—were only catering for the male customer, or at best, they were offering a male boot, that had been ‘girlied up.’

After she wear had entered the market, offering a women’s specific boot, and began to gain traction, other companies wanted in on the action. Stacey sums it up, “We were the test that the other brands weren’t prepared to do.”

It quickly became an aggressively competitive market. “They all have their women’s brands now. We have been copied multiple times.”

For a small business, without the marketing budget and experience of larger, more established companies, the challenge is real. And the answer? For she wear, it’s about finding their competitive advantages and unique selling points. They are different in a purposeful way: they have a community, they talk to their customers, and they are uniquely positioned as the only female-founded and female-led business offering female-specific safety and work footwear.

Stacey’s favourite part of the business is product development. “If I could have my way, I’d probably spend all day doing product development, but it’s a small business so it’s not possible.”

Being an ultra consumer-focused business, most of the product development comes from customer feedback. They take the feedback—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and use it for product improvement. Their highest-selling work boot is specifically built around customer feedback.

Above all, the feedback has shown different designs are needed for different industries and different fits for different feet. Some people have flat feet. Some have a really high arch. Some have narrow feet, others wide. It’s necessarily a highly technical product.

So, market expansion was organic and customer-led. The comfort and technology which went into the earlier safety boot models meant they were being worn by women in unintended sectors, like nursing. But they were unnecessarily heavy with a steel cap—not required for nurses. Rather, they needed slip resistance as a safety feature. As the research unfolded, it was evident so many women weren’t wearing correct footwear—they weren’t compliant, or they were wearing fashion shoes which gave them a sore back and sore feet by the end of the day.

Today, she wear’s catalogue is loaded with options, catering to a customer base in a vast array of fields—forensic cleaners, courier drivers, factory workers, engineers, and so forth. With much more to come, we hear—Stacey says there are a whole lot of new product lines in the pipeline (she sounds very excited, but is guarded about elaborating).

As business growth steadily climbs for she wear, the opportunity for branching out into B2B does not go unnoticed. Stacey acknowledges there’s a lot of potential and they’re already tapping into it a little with some customized workwear for mining and industrial groups.

“We introduced an inventory management system at the end of last year so that will really help us to focus on, and grow, B2B. Running inventory is so important when you’re doing those larger contracts.”

However, being female-only becomes a real challenge for gaining large tenders and contracts. A lot of these tenders and contracts are predominantly male. “If they’re, say, 90% male 10% female, do they really want to split their supply chain? It’s going to these companies and asking them to think outside the square.”

The wholesale market is another territory where, thus far, she wear have only trodden lightly. Stacey explains it’s mainly because of the narrative they have with their customers. It’s a highly engaged, high-feedback community of customers. If that interaction point with the customer is given over to a third party, there’s a risk of losing touch with the end-user and the narrative disappearing.

The narrative is like a protection layer, keeping customers happy. “We know our product and we know why we designed it. We can make sure that that customer is comfortable from the get-go.”

Also, Stacey worries the customer may not be informed to the same level if they buy through a wholesaler. There is a lot of information provided to the customer—especially in terms of sizing and the technical aspects—information they’ve worked on perfecting for seven years.

She says they’re working on a way around it, “We’re in the middle of rewriting our website, so there’ll be an education piece around that so regardless of whether someone buys through a wholesaler or direct with us, they will still have access to that information.”

she wear already sell internationally through their website, but they are gearing up to focus more on the global market. Planning is underway with strategies around 3PLs or distribution centers being devised, as well as product development. They’re already making prototypes for different markets.

“We’re doing that behind the scenes­­—we can take our core products and slightly tweak them for other markets.” For example, in Australia, there’s no need for insulated boots, whereas, in a market like Canada or the UK, it’s required.

They have to get a handle on different sizing, differing foot shapes, and new work categories. But, if anyone can handle this type of adaption, she wear can.

As for everyone, the early days of Covid were worrisome for she wear and there was no telling what was going to happen. She wear were one of the lucky ones––things didn’t grind to halt. In fact, they experienced phenomenal growth during 2020.

“I guess the fact that we’re functional footwear, it didn’t affect our business,” says Stacey.

Women were still working in distribution centers. They were still nursing. They were still caring for the aged. They were still working on the roads. And so, the warehouse continued to dispatch during the entire time.

The timing was fortunate too­­—they had just implemented a new digital marketing strategy and they had recently expanded, broadening to a wider work footwear market.

For she wear, community is a massive part of the brand value and brand ethos. They believe it’s extremely important to give back to local communities and have donated over $60,000 to charities and people in need around Australia.

They partner with not-for-profit organisations such as IWIMRA (Indigenous Women in Mining and Resources) to whom they donate 100% of the proceeds from their range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island laces.

As well, she wear supports Rise Up, a DV (Domestic Violence) organisation, and Share the Dignity, which distributes thousands of period products to those in need. In 2020, they set up a ‘Bush Fire & Drought Care Programme,’ sending over $13,000 worth of product in care packs to women affected by the heart-breaking bushfires and disastrous droughts. They’ve donated boots to Queensland Aboriginal communities, and to Queensland RSPCA for their staff and volunteers to wear in their animal shelters. The list goes on.

There’s an immense sense of purpose, of community, of wanting to make a difference.  Without virtue signalling either—Stacey only lightly touches on their contributions—we have to dig into the website to find out more.

“Definitely we like to involve our local community, and I think as a small business operator we have a responsibility for that. It’s probably something I don’t spend a lot of time marketing. I just think it’s an authentic thing that everyone should be doing regardless.”

It’s a remarkable thing when a small business like she wear can shine such a big light in so many ways.

#001 : Scotch & Soda designs, manufactures, and sells eclectic, modern, luxury clothing for men, women, and kids. Its clothing range is supplemented by denim, footwear, and accessories, such as fragrances and eyewear, which continue to cement Scotch & Soda as a brand for discerning shoppers who consciously choose a lifestyle of freedom and choice.

From its humble beginnings in Amsterdam, the past 35 years have seen Scotch & Soda expand from a menswear-only brand to the all-inclusive global offering it is today. Its designs can now be found at over 7,000 selected retailers and in 247 standalone stores worldwide. Customers in over 70 countries can avail themselves of its growing online service.

In this first of our Overdose & Chill LIVE sessions, Todd Welling (CEO – Overdose) chats with Tom Franey (Head of Ecommerce at Scotch & Soda Australia) about his journey, what makes the brand unique, the impact of Covid-19, and how the company is managing customer retention.

From his initial job in sales on a shop floor, Tom quickly took up an opportunity to train and gain experience in retail marketing and online content. He joined Scotch & Soda in 2019 to lead their digital transformation and omnichannel retail strategy across Australia and New Zealand.

With a tagline of “Amsterdam Couture,” Scotch & Soda is a luxury European brand aimed at discerning consumers who demand style and quality in both wardrobe staples and statement pieces.

Speaking of the company’s emphasis on the importance of each customer’s in-store experience, Tom describes the impact of “the smell, the touch of the products… the brass and the gold finishings throughout the store” to the Fashion Hosts and Stylists whose priority it is to make a one-to-one connection with each customer who comes through the door, regardless of how busy the store is.

With Tom at the helm, Scotch & Soda has put its Australia/New Zealand digital transformation and omnichannel retail strategy in very good hands.

In order to help Scotch & Soda meet its desired business outcomes, Overdose has been working with Tom and his team to integrate launch a new Magento 2 Commerce Cloud website, integrated with its Apparel 21 ERP via Comestri middleware. The utilization of Comestri allows for bi-directional transfer of product, order fulfillment, shipping, and accounting functions whilst allowing the company to syndicate products to their additional channels.

Scotch & Soda has created a way of thinking that has helped shape today’s global brand. Its passion for original thinking and rejecting the normal and mundane has opened the way for its clothing styles to be seen as a key indicator of the wearer’s beliefs and an outward symbol of belonging to a distinct subculture and movement. This ongoing journey with Overdose and Magento will further enhance the digitization of the customer experience to grow and shape this global brand in the future and to amplify the retailing of its distinctive brand of shirts, sweaters, suits, outerwear, shoes, and accessories to individuals around the world who want to make a statement.

View the Scotch & Soda Case Study here