Future Commerce

Welcome to Season 8 of Step by Step. This season we’re partnering with fabric to discuss how brands can stand out from the crowd by investing in an experiential design. Tune in every day this week to hear from experts on how to unlock your eCommerce growth. Listen now!

• Ryan Bartley is the Founder of Fabric, a leading modular and headless enterprise commerce platform helping brands and retailers innovate and scale.
• Experience is not only your digital experiences and touchpoints within stores but also the brand touchpoints and the service level you give your customers.
• “What we're hearing from all of the companies that we work with is really a concern about just what the next handful of months and what the next year looks like.” -Ryan
• Start targeting your software and figuring out how to serve your customers in the best possible way
• Is now the time to rip and replace legacy tech or is it time to optimize it? It can be difficult to replace, so you should be working on ways to optimize your tech stack, but also looking for ways to optimize your content stack.
• “We at fabric personally don’t believe in the word customization, but rather in configuration. It’s your platform, not ours.” -Ryan
• “It's intuitive that you should improve your experience and service level because you look at the competitor set in your groups and they're doing it, they're not messing around.” -Ryan

• Want to learn more about how to take your brand to the next leve? Download our free Step by Step guide!
• Get connected with fabric!
• Learn more about Ryan Bartley
• Listen to our other Step by Step seasons
• Find our other Future Commerce episodes on our website

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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Joining the show today is Karin Dillie, coming to talk about Recurate’s newest report, all things resale, from Gen Z to Boomers, omnichannel, and more! Tune in now! 

• Recurate started as a way for brands to reclaim resale
• Recurate has recently released a new piece of research called the Recurate Resale Report, they wanted to dig in and find the data on what is happening in resale
• “What we wanted to do was dig in a bit more into primary data and really understand the motivations and behaviors that are happening and what consumers want from brands.” – Karin
• In their research, they found a new cohort of customers called “Circulars”: people who are buying and selling.
• Resale has happened in previous generations but it's happening differently now, you can interact more than you used to, and you’re able to interact across all the different channels, ages, and genders
• “63% of people want brands to do more. Customers are already doing this, some version of it, whether it be localized or online, and they want more help in doing it well.” – Karin
• “This is an element of omnichannel that is never talked about.” – Phillip
• Everything in direct to consumer era in a nutshell is the level of loyalty and experience that comes with the brand
• Brands need to learn how we create this omnichannel relationship with resale in the same way that we've done with channel flexing for buying IRL or turning to Amazon for staples.
• It’s all about building the resale operating systems that meet your customers where they want to be. The biggest part of this is helping customers understand that there is value in their items.

• Learn more about Karin Dillie and Recurate
• Download Recurte’s Resale Report
• Subscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes!
• Download VISIONS 2022 NOW!
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
• Check out our newest Step by Step launching Monday!

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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In this episode, we dive into some of the best moments of the last year and a half of Future Commerce as it pertains to Web3. Tune in now!

• “Like everything else with new technology, the technology's awesome, but until you find creative people to use it in really interesting ways, it doesn't do a whole lot.” – Michael Janiak
• Mags is someone who is thinking about the future of the startup ecosystem. She’s passionate about why and how people spend their time, money, and attention
• “I don't think I'm a consumer brands investor. I don't think I'm a consumer tech investor. I'm a consumer needs investor..” – Magdalena Kala
• The journey of NFTs is still early. In many ways, they’re very similar to DTC brands as they become easy to launch, and the early movers have made a lot of money
• NFTs signal loyalty. They’re a way to assign value to what it means to be associated with a brand.
• “Hype alone isn’t enough to build an enduring brand or community.”
• There has to be a non-monetary reason that people are engaged in community — for sneakerheads this is the love of the culture and nostalgia that endures well past childhood. Sneakerheads come from many different backgrounds and walks of life. A digital goods community around sneakers may be much more durable than any other PFP (Picture for Proof) project.
• NFT Project creators are doxxing themselves now to increase optionality. There’s a lot more to gain by having a trusted reputation as a person than there is as a cartoon avatar.
• “I think of the community from which sneakers actually emanate. How can I make it so that anybody can be rewarded even for their participation, for their love of and the passion of whatever that community represents?” – Brandon Martinez
• “Everything we're doing online has an offline analog. We're reinventing a lot of our everyday normal commerce experiences, but we're doing it in a digital realm. And this is what Web3 unlocks for us; there's nothing new under the sun.” –Phillip

• Infinite Shelf Season 1 Episode 8: WEB3 BTC DOA FUD WAGMI: WTF
• Episode 240: “Magdalena Kala: "I'm a Consumer Needs and Wants Investor"
• Episode 262: Building a Web3 Company After the NFT Crash
• Episode 266: There’s Nothing New Under the Sun
• Subscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes!
• Download VISIONS 2022 NOW!
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
• Check out Decoded, our newest limited series

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. 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.

• Brian is live from Etail East, covering what’s going on, how it went, and how far conference season has come since last year.
• We’re not talking about data anymore… we’re talking about vibes. We talk about them in The Senses, but the vibe shift is different for everything.
• “The funniest thing about this idea of vibe shift is that everyone is having a really hard time defining what it is and where we're going.” – Brian
• In the wise words of Brian Lange, “you can’t have a vibe if you’re not with somebody.”
• Everyone is casting lots of their communal vibes into a pool, and a layer cake is happening of what the new vibe is. If the vibes are wrong, you go and find a new vibe.
• People are going to follow the algorithm no matter what, it's just who we are.
• “If the algorithm is the ultimate media, the message is humanity is unnecessary.” – Brian
• The algorithm is taking over things that humanity can analyze, those being: what is, what could be, and what should be.
• “This person's livelihood is at the mercy of the algorithm.” –Phillip
• When you don’t update the algorithm soon enough, the crying selfie is what happens. Eventually, it leads to undesirable outcomes because everyone plays the game well.

• The Senses
• Insiders #128: The Asynchronous Fiction
• The Medium is the Massage from Marshall McLuhan
• Episode 266: There’s Nothing New Under the Sun
• Visions Episode 4: Our Sh*tty Robot Future
• From the Atlantic: Why the Old Elite Spend So Much Time At Work
• The Network State
• Subscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes!
• Download VISIONS 2022 NOW!
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
• Check out Decoded, our newest limited series

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. 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.

“Digital is gaining the experiences we’ve had all along IRL” — today we sit down with Seyi Taylor to chat about the online experiences we take for granted, the actual capabilities of web3, and how commerce gives us emotional resonance. Tune in now!

• The ability to have control is attractive to brands, and that's one thing web3-based loyalty platforms provide, which creates incentives for merchants and brands to be more experimental.
• Regarding whether web3 is anything new or novel: “What it's actually enabling is more modalities to come into the digital space that we're accustomed to having in real life.” -Phillip
• The way we use tokens right now isn’t going to stay this way. Right now tokens are all the hype, but soon they will become a way to get stuff done.
• Pokemon Go is back on the craze, even though it's a blast from past of six years ago. The question is, will we get engrossed in AR examples that are layered over top of a reality we already cohabitate in?
• “We've spent the last phase of the internet in this situation where people really didn't care as to where the data was, but we’ve started to see that shift of “where is my data?”’- Seyi
• Regarding the growth of browser plugins and blockchain analysis: “Third-party cookies be damned. All the work is done for you because we can attribute anything, theoretically.” -Phillip
• If the medium is the blockchain, what is the message? “The thing that's happened on the Internet is it's been a great access revolution without a lot of ownership.” -Seyi

• Learn more about Seyi Taylor and Shopthru
• The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
• Pokemon Go Craze
• Subscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes!
• Download VISIONS 2022 NOW!
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
• Check out Decoded, our newest limited series

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. 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.

We live in a world that doesn’t work all the way. Is the amount of automation and machine learning and AI and even robotics that we're implementing in the world, displacing people's jobs and having a human impact?

Show Notes

• “It's creating some dynamics where a much smaller number of people can drive outcomes with a much larger number of dollars. If we're not really effective at promoting financial literacy and asking some big questions about what's different looking 20 years ahead from what the last 20 years were like, then there's going to be some collateral damage in the system that I think is really bad for everybody involved.” - Mike Lackman
• “You can automate things to make them more efficient, but you have to know how to do it well in the first place with a certain level of agency and authority and getting your hands dirty with it.” - Michael Miraflor
• How often are we designing the software stack before we even have a product and before we have even have addressed the customer’s problem?
• “Just blatantly throwing software at problems to solve problems, thinking that it's the software that overcomes the deficiencies of an impractical product or business, I think is itself inherently a challenge that we're all facing in our industry.” - Phillip Jackson
• What are some of those things that we're bringing into being or what we're building in the world that are laden with our biases?
• “One of the most frustrating things about customer service is when you end up on the phone with a system that is trying to replicate that of a human voice, human interaction, or human way of answering questions... You don't have to try to trick me to think that you're a person because you're just not. I would rather hit a series of numbers…to get you to answer versus me interacting with this AI as if you were human.” - Michael Miraflor
• “You have to get a gauge on what young people are thinking as expressed by what they're wearing and what they're doing. If you can't really get a sense of that, because the dominant form of social media is encouraging the proliferation of micro trends that really aren't a reflection, but they send a smoke signal, then you might have something that's a bit problematic on your hands.” - Michael Miraflor
• “The interesting piece here is that when we talk about this dystopian sort of like, well, this AI future, we're all going to get pushed around this and that. The alternative to that has to be an institution with enough trust and credibility that we're willing to let them become tastemakers, editors of newspapers, curators of fashion, pairers of coffee, those kinds of things.” - Mike Lackman
• “There was a dark side to those things that we do see as unifying, which is they tend to have some sort of pretty strong editorial, perhaps even tyrannical authority associated with them to be able to set those standards in place. And I guess my point of jousting with you on that when we think about AI, the counterpoint to letting the system just run the algorithm unchecked is that someone has to put guardrails on that.” - Mike Lackman
• Will the outputs of AI technology like Dall-E applied to commercial uses be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run?
• Michael Miraflor, Chief Brand Officer
• Mike Lackman, CEO of Trade Coffee

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at [email protected] or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners!

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Today, Philip and Brian welcome back Kendall Dickieson to chat about the creator economy, how TikTok is changing the way for brands, digital pruning, and how creation affects community. Tune in now! 

• The Creator economy has begun to shift the DTC space and change the landscape, but there is still proof in the pudding.
• “Platforms like TikTok have exposed the true analytics for the most part, but there's still things on the back end that we don't really know unless we ask the creator.” -Kendall
• Digital pruning- where we should be watering and filtering our social channels, and tending to our gardens (accounts.)
• There can be an over-pruning of social accounts and your community. Brands and creators should be watchful of these thresholds
• “There's so much that brands need to do to exist on social from the content creation side to now, contracting out creators, to building out teams.” -Kendall
• Phillip poses the question: Does the creation of a community become undermined by most people going to a social platform and getting them to move out of the entertainment box to the getting value box?
• Great marketing and a great product equals amazing success

• Learn more about Kendall Dickieson 
• Listen to our other episode with Kendall!
• Subscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes!
• Download VISIONS 2022 NOW!
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
• Check out Decoded, our newest limited series

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. 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.

In this episode, we call into question some of the factors that have led to the decline of DTC and how pent-up frustration with products that cost more without delivering on their promise will soon be a vestige of a bygone era. Listen now! 

• “The Uncorkening” is a latent criticism that was stymied by the loudest voices in an ecosystem who didn’t feel that they had permission to speak up, has now been unleashed
• DTC models (particularly VC-backed IPO exits) have proven unsuccessful. The original promise was that DTC would remove middlemen and form a direct connection with the consumer; meanwhile, eCommerce is nothing but middlemen.
• Many products don't live up to the hype. Another factor of The Uncorkening in DTC is that the loudest voices and advocates for DTC have often silenced criticism by playing a trump card — to critique a small brand is to criticize the founder behind the brand.
• The loudest DTC voices have quieted. As capital outcomes wither for those who had built their reputations on the examination of the DTC space, the loudest voices were silenced. Due in large part to The Great Resignation and the inaccessibility of capital in the current state of the markets, many of the most visible DTC acolytes have moved on to new projects or industries.
• What will The Uncorkening make us not want to buy next?

• Subscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes!
• Download VISIONS 2022 NOW!
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
• Check out Decoded, our newest limited series

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. 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.

Phillip and Brian sit down to chat about GROW NY, YouTube Shopping, Instagram Local, and all the things in between. Listen now!

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Live from the Visions Summit in West Palm Beach, FL, the conversation in this episode is around what we call Brand Romanticism. We’ve seen such an amazing proliferation of brand. There's more choice than ever before. Some say that brands are our canvas and the products are these new pieces of art that are being brought to the world. Are brands artists and our products their canvas?

Show Notes

• Are some brands fooling themselves thinking of their role as one of art when really their product is more about commodity and their role is really about commerce?
• Have we romanticized brands more than what is due to it? “Brands have an opportunity to support art and not delude themselves into thinking that they are the creators of product.” - Grace Clarke
• “Consumers are going to know if you're dressing up something that's basic and adding a couple of zeros to it because you've romanticized it by using some kind of art style to style it. But at the same time, I think it's important that brands understand where there might be adjacencies to their product.” - Miya Knights
• “You can make an argument that the brand is not art, but the brand is an excellent curator of the culture that it is participating in. Are you co-opting something that exists in culture for marketing purposes or for promotional purposes? Or are you a participant?” - Michael Miraflor
• “It seems like everyone who talks passionately about what they're working on automatically goes from 0 to 100 talking about getting venture-backed and shooting for a big exit, which is totally fine. I mean, that would be an amazing outcome. But I would love to see the story of more founders working hard on their projects regardless of that outcome.” - Michael Miraflor
• “Art is something that I would rather companies, specifically founders who are perhaps at an earlier stage and they're still understanding who their customer is and how their brand can grow, maybe borrow the principles of what it is to be an artist rather than trying to see yourself as one.” - Grace Clarke
• “Artists have to be true to themselves. A brand has to be true to its customers.” - Miya Knights
• “We affix ourselves to certain products or brands because it helps us understand who we are, and it also helps us relate to other people in our own niche. It gives us this shorthand in this other language. We can find each other quickly. We can converse on Twitter with this other language. So that belonging is a huge part of brand identity for me. That romanticism of art and gathering is really about social sharing.” - Grace Clarke
• “There are so many dynamics emerging that probably drag brands towards feeling that they should be more like art. But I think they have to be really clear on their purpose as a merchant and whether or not they have an artisanship or an artisanal story to tell.” - Miya Knights

• Miya Knights, author and retail analyst
• Michael Miraflor, Chief Brand Officer
• Grace Clarke, brand and omnichannel strategist

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. 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.