MarTalks- The #1 Ecommerce and MarTech application podcast

** Alex Hase and the Marketplace Magic with Mirakl**

🎙️ *What happens when you mix entrepreneurial grit, a love for building teams, and a passion for eCommerce innovation? You get Alex Hase, CRO of Mirakl, and one of the most dynamic leaders in the marketplace revolution and an awfully nice fellow.  

In my latest MarTalks episode, Alex brought us along his trek in eCommerce—from joining his first startup at 28 to leading Mirakl’s Americas division through explosive growth. His career has spanned everything from pre-revenue startups to scaling global teams at companies generating hundreds of millions in revenue. Alex lives to build—whether it’s a team, a strategy, or a new market.  

Here are the high points:  

1️⃣ **Entrepreneurial DNA**: Alex thrives in environments where he can roll up his sleeves and build from scratch. Whether it’s designing go-to-market strategies or assembling high-performing teams, he’s done it all—and isn’t afraid to be the first one carrying the bag.  

2️⃣ **Marketplaces Are Transforming Retail**: Under Alex’s leadership, Mirakl has surpassed $10 billion in GMV and onboarded iconic brands like Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, and Christian Louboutin. Why? Because marketplaces empower retailers to expand assortments, build brand partnerships, and unlock new revenue streams—all while giving consumers more choice and control.  

3️⃣ **Luxury Loves Control**: Lux brands are digging Mirakl because their marketplace model allows them to maintain control over pricing, merchandising, and brand storytelling. For Nordstrom, this means each and every luxury brand gets a full expression consistently across all channels. 

4️⃣ **Retail Media Is the Next Big Thing**: Alex is spearheading Mirakl’s push into retail media—it’s game-changing brand-new revenue stream that democratizes ad inventory for smaller brands while delivering relevant ads to consumers. Who doesn’t love a win-win-win for retailers, brands, and shoppers!

5️⃣ **Curiosity Feeds The Cat**: Alex thinks his success is due to his insatiable need to geek out on new industries and tech. If it’s cutting edge, he’s got the paper cuts, and he hasn’t change since those early days of SaaS or diving into cross-border eCommerce at Flow Commerce (later acquired by Global-E), he’s always been driven by a desire to learn, adapt and change his spots. 

Alex’s story is one of transformational leadership and extraordinary outcomes, along with a really great attitude. If you’re considering how marketplaces or retail media could transform your business, now is the right time to explore these opportunities.  

💡 What do you think? Are marketplaces part of your strategy for 2025? Let me know in the comments!  

#MarTalks #Marketplaces #ComposableCommerce #Leadership

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Nat Pavic from Salesforce Commerce and Liesel Walsh who led marketing teams at  Boston, Proper, Party City, Petco and Restoration Hardware shared their extensive backgrounds in the industry and their evolving relationship with customer data as new technologies have come online to address and service their customers. The emergence of digital twin technology, which modernizes product management by providing dynamic data aggregation, thereby enhancing the understanding of product lifecycles and customer experiences was explored.

We discussed the role of generative AI in e-commerce and its ability to save labor and create new opportunities. Generative AI can generate product images and improve presentation based on a customer’s browsing behavior, while also crafting product descriptions that align with customer search terms making them both easier to publish and be located by shoppers. Gen Ai further aims to improve shopping experience by bridging the gap between brand language and customer understanding. 

We then turned to sustainability, and the practical impact of recommerce. luxury brands have been the first real beneficiaries of recommerce with popular sites The Real Real and Poshmark paving the way. Recommerce can also help brands increase profitability and inventory management, engage customers and enhance brand storytelling through those long tail relationships.

Challenges remain in authenticating low-value items, vs. luxury brands.  The potential for brands to utilize NFTs, to enhance customer engagement, upsell, service and repair are unprecedented and available today.  Gen AI will take those legacy brand recommerce customers engaged through the creation of ever more personalized customer experiences in a market with increasing product scarcity.

Our moonshot of the segment was the discussion of how retailers and brands could adopt a green score to inform consumers about product recyclability and carbon footprints. Consumers have shown that they willing to pay a premium for quality sustainable products, and that will help retailers maintain their margins with those offerings. 

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

This episode of Martalks features Casper Rasmussen, global VP of Valtech and president of the MACH Alliance, and Kyle Barz, global head of technology for Mars. They discuss their collaboration, and how Valtech helped Mars to transform their ecommerce architecture and adopt a composable model.

Read more about this episode on the Rosenstein Group blog: https://bit.ly/4eIWPqA

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Today, early ecommerce personalization tools can limit the customer’s ability to shop the full depth and breadth of a catalog on a merchant’s website – leaving a lot of incremental revenue untapped.

PSYKHE AI is a recommendation engine designed to solve this exact problem. Alongside standard personalization functionality, it also personalizes ecommerce site grids, based on a wide range of data, including the customer’s psychographic traits. It works in real time, reranking the selection every 10 seconds with each user interaction.

In our latest episode of Martalks, PSYKHE founder Anabel Maldonado describes how PSYKHE aims to make more human-like recommendations based on a wide range of data, and knowledge of the user’s personality – rather than simply showing visually similar items.

Read more about our conversation here.

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Data orchestration is a growing priority for enterprise brands, as they seek to gain greater visibility and control of data across connected systems.

Leading the charge in this space is Sana Remekie, co-founder of Conscia, a composable data orchestration solution which works for enterprise brands. Sana joined us on this podcast episode alongside Conscia’s implementation partner Orium, with CEO Jason Cottrell returning for his second episode of Martalks.

Read the full article based on this conversation, here.

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Product information management (PIM) has been one of the most dynamic martech categories in recent years. This is thanks to the sheer range of things that can be optimized by getting a better handle on product data: from merchandising, to search, personalization, analytics, order management, seasonal campaigning and more.

Unpacking PIM for us on the latest episode of Martalks was Pimberly founder and CEO, Martin Balaam. Like many founders, Martin’s lived experience of the problems that that his solution solves led to the founding of a highly successful business.

Described modestly as “the little bit in the middle” between various inputs and outputs, Pimberly is now a MACH Alliance-certified solution with a valid claim to being the best-of-breed in its category. The company continues to scale with B2Bs and B2Cs on both sides of the Atlantic.

Read an article based on this conversation at Rosenstein Group.com.

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

One of the striking trends of the composable era has actually played out on the customer side.

As deployments to full-stack composable commerce have become faster, brands have invested more heavily in the talent needed to lead digital efforts from inside, and command greater control of the data.

In this special episode of Martalks, we put three of those brand-side tech pioneers on the podium to discuss the roadmaps of their journeys to composable adoption. 

Speaking to…

• Fred Argir - formerly CIO  of Toys “R” Us and Barnes & Noble, and now CEO of The Argir Group
• Diane Randolph, a seasoned CIO on the board of Shoe Carnival, Former CIO Ulta Beauty, and who now advises technology companies such as Orium
• Stuart McKeachie, CTO at Serena & Lily, and formerly of Williams-Sonoma and Restoration Hardware.

…we investigated the marketing requirements and difficulties that provided the motivation for replatforming to composable platforms and the agility that the business gained as a result.

We also delved into the agents of change, and how that responsibility falls variously to vendors, integrators, and in-house personnel, and the cultural implications of transformation for the wider business.

Read a full summary of this podcast at Rosenstein Group.com.

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Forward-thinking brands have long known that customer consent is a crucial component in effective marketing. This has come into greater focus recently with stricter regulation around the proper use of customer data, and the long expected death of third-party cookies finally coming to pass. 

But how do you actually secure that consent, at scale, without becoming intrusive? Zohar Hod, a serial entrepreneur with experience in fintech, has crossed over to the martech world to answer that question. 

His latest venture, One Creation, is a low-code customer preference solution. By seamlessly integrating into any part of the digital consumer journey, their solution can confirm or acquire new data, enrich existing customer profiles, and allow for personalisation that doesn’t veer from the attentive into ‘the creepy’ (in Zohar’s words). 

In the latest edition of Martalks, I talk to Zohar about the importance of zero-party data, about how One Creation integrates with other solutions in the modern composable marketing stack, and his key learnings from founding five startups over the course of his fascinating career. 

You can listen to the podcast in full, or read a transcript of the key moments here: https://bit.ly/4aZWNIy.

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

For all the analytics tools in the modern ecommerce stack, retailers often still experience discrepancies between the analytics data, and actual revenue figures in the ecommerce platform.

Ultimately, this restricts marketing, since a lack of confidence in the data translates into greater caution when allocating budgets.

Solving this problem is Edward Upton, whose company, Littledata, helps retailers harness the first-party data at their disposal, and to ensure greater accuracy across the whole marketing arsenal. Intergrating with marketing channels such as Klaviyo, Google Analytics and Meta, as well as with commerce platforms including Shopify.

Edward joined us on the latest episode of Martalks, where we discussed how Littledata’s Klaviyo integration can help brands not only with abandoned carts, but even abandoned browsing sessions.

We also touched on how lost confidence in the data trickles down to the agencies that brands collaborate with, and dipped into Edward’s prior experience as a startup founder, including the importance of starting a new business with the right team.

You can also listen to the podcast, or read a summary article, on our website: https://bit.ly/3J2NkEG

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

With the dramatic rise in the popularity and adoption of MACH technologies across ecommerce and Martech, the question of how to innovate, or follow the trodden path, is of tremendous importance to vendors and merchants alike these days.

On the one hand, an increasingly competitive market for martech solutions has seen the rise of a lot of groundbreaking solutions. On the other, retailers and ISVs (and, indeed, their investors) need to achieve certainty wherever possible by relying on tried and tested approaches. Add to this that the composable space is best viewed as “compostable” where best of breed solutions will be able to be ever more quickly and easily integrated into tech stacks replacing legacy solutions.  Therefore it is imperative that solutions creators pursue dual development path first of product innovation and second of product integration are pursued with equal vigour to insure long term success and relevance for customers. 

Leading composable agencies like Orium play a key role here in developing the accelerators to drive those integrations and adoptions to success reliably and quickly. 

Few have a keener perspective on such questions than Jason Cottrell, Orium's founder, one of the leading ecommerce integrators, and one of the most trusted and leading voices of the composable solutions movement.

In our first Martalks episode of season 2, Jason shared his experience that dates back to Orium’s first incarnation as Myplanet. Covering 15 years of ecommerce history, this conversation tracks: 

• the evolution of composability, through the earliest experiments with headless systems, 
• the explosion in modern, API-first solutions
• the changing relevance and role of legacy vendors in the market.

You can listen to the podcast in full, and read a summary article, on our website: https://bit.ly/3OTSupS

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.