Talk Commerce

Damien Retzinger is the founder and software engineer at Graycore, and the BDFL of Daffodil, an open source ecommerce front end framework with about 60 libraries, one per unit of ecommerce, and a driver layer that connects the same storefront to Magento or Shopify, with a Medusa driver in progress.

Daffodil came out of the Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration, when merchants wanted the upgrade and did not want their customers to learn a new website. Damien ripped the front end off, wrote an API for each version, and swapped them underneath, then decided to solve that problem once and never again.

He now writes 75 to 90 percent of his code with a machine and reviews the output himself, and he thinks the individual contributor becomes a code reviewer inside two years. We also get into the Grill Me planning skill he recommends before letting anything rip, why lines of code is a poor metric and features per hour is a better one, headful against headless, and his read on the Magento lull in the US.

What is next for him is the Graycore ecommerce AI starter, a free and open source one click Magento store on GitHub Codespaces, with Hyva, MageOS, or Daffodil on the front and Claude built in.

Links
Graycore https://graycore.io/
Daffodil https://github.com/graycoreio/daffodil
Ecommerce AI starter https://ecommerce-ai-starter.graycore.io/
Damien on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/damien-retzinger-7615ba91/

Every guest on Talk Commerce gets a free joke whether they want one or not. Damien rated his an eight. The Free Joke Project

A special episode, recorded live at The Lead Summit, May 20 and 21, 2026, in New York City.

Michael Klein is the Director of Industry Marketing at Talkdesk, where he owns the messaging and the marketing for the retail, travel, and consumer goods industries. Talkdesk started in contact center software, began building its AI close to ten years ago, and now runs as a customer experience platform covering the work before, during, and after a sale, from product discovery through returns and recalls.

In this conversation: the phrase Michael uses for what natural language processing did to the phone tree, the European hospitality customer whose callers reach the right person without pressing a button, why he says a deployment cannot run at a hundred percent bot, the guardrails Talkdesk puts around customer data and where it travels, and Brent's own story of asking four times for a human and canceling the service instead.

What is next: governance, privacy, and transparency, which Michael says he is not hearing enough about on conference stages while a healthy percentage of consumers stay skeptical of AI.

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Rotimi Kehinde is the founder of Kingdom Branding, a full service marketing agency in Chicago doing web development and social media, which they call growth marketing. This is a special content edition, so Isaac Morey, chief editor and co-founder of Content Cucumber, co-hosts.

Rotimi came to the US from Nigeria, spent one year in corporate work he hated, and started out as a graphic designer before taking an unpaid creative director role on a Chicago mayoral campaign. The agency grew out of his living room to a team of seven, doing brand design for the Democratic Party of Illinois, the Secretary of State's campaign site and branding, entertainment, and nonprofits. The agency does no marketing of its own and runs on word of mouth and partnerships.

He draws a line between AI-powered content and AI-supported content and puts his agency on the supported side, because you cannot prompt engineer your way to something worth reading. He watched content agencies fold when clients decided they would do the writing themselves, and he says the output stopped getting picked up.

We also get into website accessibility as a legal question and a moral one, what brands are changing to stay discoverable by LLMs, and the three pillars of his theme for the year, supersonic.

Links

Every guest on Talk Commerce gets a free joke whether they want one or not. Rotimi rated his a ten. The Free Joke Project

Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.

Benjamin Spiegel is the Chief Digital Officer at Polywood, the outdoor furniture maker that turns recycled plastic into lumber and lumber into furniture on its own floor. The model is just-in-time: a checkout on the website triggers the lumber run in the right color, the build, the box, and the shipment, with no finished inventory in between.

In this conversation: why vertical integration cuts freight as much as it cuts waste, why Spiegel thinks this is the best time to be a creative, the difference between big-C creative ideas and small-c asset production, how his AI bill tripled while the creative headcount stayed flat, and the five consumer-persona agents his team shows work to before a human ever does.

What is next: helping people design outdoor spaces, a problem Spiegel says no AI tool handles yet because outside has no walls.

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.

Aman Advani is the co-founder and CEO of Ministry of Supply, the performance-fabric clothing brand he started with two engineers he met in school. Fourteen years in, the company runs direct to consumer on a hub of Shopify, Klaviyo, and a homegrown forecasting and purchasing engine called the Ministry Production System.

In this conversation: why every product starts from a problem statement (sweat stains, stiff fabric, dry cleaning), the email that told him it was 97 degrees in Atlanta and his jacket would arrive Tuesday, why he answers five customer emails a day himself, and his rule for AI in content: amplify the message, never manipulate it. First in class is the secret sauce and stays human. Best in class is everything else, and that is where the AI goes.

What is next: after fourteen years of clothing, Ministry of Supply is moving into bags.

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Recorded live at Shopware Partner Day in Austin, Texas on April 22, 2026.

Mark Stanley is Shopware's chief product and technology officer, where he looks after all product development. He walks through what is landing this year. Shopware's own native PaaS has just gone GA, highly opinionated and driven from the command line. An intelligence suite is in progress, bringing AI into bulk editing, CMS content generation and store data insights. And Nexus, an orchestration system for connecting Shopware instances to each other and to third party systems, goes GA at Shopware Community Day in Cologne.

His hot take is data sovereignty, and business model sovereignty with it. More SaaS providers want to hoover up as much data as they can get, which suits a merchant who wants one button to push. Merchants thinking further out want to keep control of where the business model lives and where the proprietary data sits. His advice is to work out what you would not want an LLM to be able to copy in two or three years, and protect that. The moats are changing.

On partners, he sees the job shifting away from shipping features and toward delivering outcomes, with tokens becoming the unit of outcome usage. On AI, he is most interested in developer tooling, where the first 80 percent of a build can happen in 20 percent of the time while the last 20 percent stays human work. And he thinks a portion of shopping stays tactile, digitally or physically, the way asking Siri to play something is a different experience from browsing Spotify.

On North America he calls it an underdog story. Shopware is the Linux to the Windows and the Android to the iOS, and the work is the ground game, the same way it was done in Europe fifteen years ago. Bring a case of beer, go on the road, get people to join the ride.

Shopware Community Day runs June 10 in Cologne. Shoptoberfest runs September 14 and 15 in Nashville.

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Sweetwater has a reputation that arrives before the box does. Ask any working musician and you get the same two details without prompting, the candy and the phone call.

Laura Smith is Vice President of Marketplaces at Sweetwater Sound, the nation's largest online musical instrument retailer, and hers is the job where that reputation is easiest to lose, because she is the one selling Sweetwater's products on somebody else's storefront.

She starts somewhere unglamorous. Consistency begins in the product data, and on a catalog as large as Amazon's the real risk is listing a product against the wrong page, one a retailer usually did not write. When the page is wrong, her team routes the fix back to the brand and will execute it on their behalf.

What she is most direct about is fulfillment. Sweetwater keeps its Amazon business through the third-party site specifically so it can control that, which means the guitars still go through a 55-point inspection, still sit in a humidity-controlled warehouse, and still get packed the same way. The warehouse never learns which channel the order came from, and customers who arrive through Amazon get routed back to Sweetwater's own service team.

On AI in content she answers yes, and then fills in the second half that usually goes missing. Humans first, because Sweetwater sells to musicians who research deeply before they buy. AI shows up as throughput rather than authorship. She also makes the case that Amazon is an opportunity rather than a competitor, and extends the same logic to LLMs and TikTok Shop without overselling how far along any of it is.

Guest: Laura Smith, Vice President of Marketplaces, Sweetwater Sound
Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.
To learn more about our at-event interviews, go to talk-commerce.com/events

John Riewerts leads product engineering at Acoustic, a marketing engagement company. He joins us on day three of eTail Boston to take apart a phrase every marketer uses and few define, bringing the audience closer to the brand, and to explain why the listening half of marketing is the half that gets underbuilt.

Riewerts frames the discipline as two tools. Marketers send messages, which becomes campaigning. And marketers listen, which means reading behavior, because as he puts it, no consumer ever sends a brand a message saying whether they like it. They answer through their actions instead.

He also walks through Acoustic AI, the company's new layer on top of the platform, and the argument behind it. Generative tools are only as good as the context they are given, so the value is in what the model gets to read. Beyond writing messages and building segments, Acoustic AI pushes unprompted recommendations when it spots repeat buyers slowing down, interest building in an out-of-stock product, unsubscribes spiking on one campaign, or consumer fatigue climbing.

He closes on four pillars, product, campaign, audience and behavioral intelligence, and a critique of the current tooling. Marketing automation is campaign-centric, and nobody lives in a single-campaign world.

Guest: John Riewerts, Lead Product Engineering, Acoustic
Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.
To learn more about our at-event interviews, go to talk-commerce.com/events

Mike Heilig is the general manager at Binary Anvil, a web development agency and systems integrator that has been running for 18 years, built mostly on Adobe Commerce, and has since branched into other platforms and a product of its own.

He takes on the SaaS promise directly. Moving to SaaS genuinely removes the hosting and patching burden, and then relocates the difficulty rather than deleting it, because business complexity does not go away. His fit test is simple. A very simple business may belong on SaaS. B2B requirements, complex catalogs and complex price lists probably do not. The mistake he sees merchants make is shopping for technology before writing down the business outcome they want.

The conversation turns to Flux, Binary Anvil's React and Next.js headless front end that attaches to an Adobe Commerce backend and supports B2C and B2B out of the box. For D&B Supply, a large farm and ranch retailer, rebuilding on Flux while keeping the Adobe Commerce backend moved site speed, conversions, organic traffic and search rankings, and cut roughly 57,000 dollars a year off upgrade cost. Heilig explains why decoupling the front end is what makes upgrades cheap, and credits Adobe for maintaining old APIs instead of deprecating them.

On AI mediated commerce he is patient rather than breathless. Structured data, machine readable documentation and clean APIs are the groundwork, the requirement is on the horizon rather than here, and the open question is whether shoppers are ready to hand a credit card to an agent at all.

Guest: Mike Heilig, General Manager, Binary Anvil

Leif Welch named his company after a music startup that failed inside a year, and he kept the name through the rebuild anyway, because the idea sitting underneath it, connecting buyers and sellers with more transparency than either of them was used to, had always been the part worth keeping. The first Jamloop was a marketplace for musicians to find new and used gear, with a social network for local players attached to it.

Jamloop is now a platform for brands and their agencies to advertise on streaming television. Welch describes it as a Facebook or Google Ads style platform for the connected TV world, with an analytics layer that tracks store visits, website visits, purchases, and whether the campaign earned a real return on ad spend.

Recorded on the eTail Boston floor ahead of his keynote, Welch previews the argument he is taking to the stage. Search and social are demand-capture channels running into saturation, and television has always been the thing that creates demand in the first place. He splits AI into two jobs, creative versioning and platform-level campaign operations, and closes with the 70-30 blueprint Jamloop is putting in front of advertisers now.

Guest: Leif Welch, Founder and CEO, Jamloop
Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.
To learn more about our at-event interviews, go to talk-commerce.com/events