Commerce Connect Podcast

As D2C manager for OLLY, a health and wellness brand owned by Unilever, Jennifer Peters is responsible for every aspect of OLLY's ecommerce store: customer experience, marketing inventory, payment gateways and more. Peters says as OLLY matures, her team has to constantly re-evaluate their strategy.  “A lot of things that worked two years ago, they don’t work anymore,” Peters explained. “I think one of the tougher pieces of that is figuring out where the issues are and then prioritizing them.”  Learn more as Peter's talks with Digital River's Emily Burton in the latest Commerce Connect podcast.

Carter Jensen is the Global Lead for Direct to Consumer at General Mills. His team works with the company’s incubator program, focused on emerging brands, using digital strategies to gain insights and test theories to bring new products to life at General Mills.

With his start-up background, Jensen is used to using every tool at his disposal to glean information that can help propel a brand forward. At General Mills, that includes launching storefronts in 5-10 days, working with founders to validate product market fit, naming, messaging and more. While the site may sell product, the real reward is the data captured from the site.  Learn more from Jensen as he sits down with Digital River's Mike Nicholas to talk about the importance of a D2C site when launching a new brand.

Astound is a powerhouse in digital commerce, helping companies strategize and build ecommerce sites to delight customers around the world. Igor Gorin is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, which puts him at the forefront of ecommerce trends. In this conversation with Digital River's Emily Burton, Gorin shares his secrets for ecommerce success. Chief among them, agility.

Kelly Goetsch, chief strategy officer for commercetools, is an  evangelist for a headless approach to ecommerce. He's recruited leaders from some of the biggest names in ecommerce to advance the idea of microservices, API-first, cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS and headless (MACH). Learn more about the MACH Alliance, commercetools' groundbreaking approach to ecommerce and what Goetsch thinks about the future of ecommerce as he sits down with Digital River's Ted Rogers for the Commerce Connect podcast.

Mike Schmid considers himself a start-up kind of a guy, which is one reason he decided it was time to leave his high-profile gig at Apple to try his hand at a company he’d been eyeing for some time, Seattle-based Rec Room. With more than 37-million users worldwide, the free-to-use platform allows creators to customize interactive rooms, and build experiences for others to share. Late last year, the company announced $145-million in new funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $3.5 billion. Heady stuff for a start-up that first got off the ground in 2016. The pandemic pushed growth even further. Learn more about Rec Room's plans for self-publishing, and how Schmid views Rec Room's place in the so-called Metaverse.