On this episode of Chill, we chat with the venerable Jim Lofgren from Nosto. Overdose’s Andrew Potkewitz and Jim discuss his journey to becoming CEO of commerce experience platform Nosto, growth, the ecomm/tech landscape, personalisation, post-pandemic trends, and the recent acquisition of UGC platform Stackla.
Now, in his fourth year as CEO of Nosto, Jim is a veteran ecommerce journeyman and recently also took on the role of Chairman of NES – Ecommerce Summit.
Nosto
When its three Finnish founders saw the limitations existing around customer experience, they boldly set out to revolutionise the whole ecommerce experience. They created Nosto and built it on the premise that every shopping experience can, and should, be personal.
They onboarded a team of top class ecommerce experts from around the world and created their game-changing platform in 2011. Nosto today, is powered by AI machine learning and extensive shopper behavioural data which gives retailers the ability to deploy fully dynamic, personalised shopping experiences and engage customers in a way never seen before.
Jim Lofgren
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.
