The Battle for Originality

The Battle for Originality

Episode 369

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Phillip:  Welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip.

Brian:  I'm Brian.

Phillip:  Brian, you're just the fun part of Future Commerce, if I'm being really honest.

Brian:  It's, uh, Brian starts with an F. I don't know.

Phillip: {cackle} What is that?

Brian: I don't know. Fun, Brian. Brian F Lange.

Phillip: Brian F Lange. Do you have an F in your... That's not your middle name?

Brian: No. It's not. It's Brian J Lange on Twitter. Come on.

Phillip: That's totally true. Used to be the Seattle suit.

Brian: Oh, man. That's a long time ago.

Phillip: What is that about? I don't know. What's the lore behind the Seattle suit?

Brian: So Seattleites are traditionally not very traditional, {laughter} and as everyone, a long time listener of this podcast would say I am pretty passionate about my region. I do love my region.

Phillip: That's an understatement.

Brian: What is the Seattle suit? It's like an Eddie Bauer jacket. It's like the worst possible. Imagine...

Phillip: Oh I get it.

Brian: Outdoorsy, outdoorsy, but also businessy. It's like a play on not even words, but yeah. Cute. Very cute.

Phillip: It was like a pre Gorpcore.

Brian: Early Gorpcore reference. Yeah. Exactly.

Phillip: Before that, yeah... What a terrible word Gorpcore was.

Brian: It's dead, I've heard. GQ said it's dead.

Phillip: Oh, thank god.

Brian: Or dying a slow death. It's funny. I think the funny part about it was that the guy is like, yeah. Of course, I'm going to keep wearing my Gorpcore stuff, but I'm just not going to call it Gorpcore. I'm just going to use it to do outdoor stuff, which means that Gorpcore isn't necessarily dead. It's just not going to be a trend.

Phillip: I'd prefer if we could ever use... {laughter} If I could ever use the men in black little flashy thing on anything, it would be for me to forget the word Gorpcore.

Brian: Gorpcore. I think that also I mean, I don't know where it originated, the term gorecore. We should probably do a little deep dive on that sometime.

Phillip: Easily referenced.

Brian: It does feel very Pacific Northwest. {laughter} It sounds like something that someone from the Seattle area would come up with. "We'll call it Gorpcore. haha." Terrible.

Phillip: Apparently, it originated as many things do in New York Magazine's fashion blog, The Cut, in 2017 by writer Jason Chen, who described a fashion trend that incorporated outdoor clothing. It feels like I hadn't heard about Gorpcore... Oh, I actually understand it now. I've never questioned it. I'd never heard about it until I want to say 2021 or so when Salomon... Maybe it was post Rihanna wearing Salomon.

Brian: No, you had heard of it before then. Gorpcore had actually...

Phillip: Maybe that's a revisionist history.

Brian: Definitely revisionist history. That was like the pinnacle of Gorpcore. It's been on a long, slow death since that moment.

Phillip: 5: ] It says the term derives from the term Normcore and the popular hiking snack, Gorp, which is potentially and possibly an acronym of good old raisins and peanuts.

Brian: That is correct at every level. Also, Normcore, wasn't that coined by Emily Segal, who's going to be at VISIONS coming up? {laughter}

Phillip: At our VISIONS summit. By the time you listen to this, it'll be mere days away. VISIONS Summit in Los Angeles, California, the Westwood neighborhood, which I've heard is an absolute nightmare to get out of at the time that our summit gets out. So it's a good thing that we have an after party that everybody should be attending and sticking around till the traffic clears. But if you're not coming out, come out. Join us at UCLA's Nimoy Theater on October 10th, and we get started around noon, but we have a half day incredible affair. We have a summit that will feature people like Emily Segal, formerly of K-Hole and now of Nemesis, a consulting group to help you understand the future of trends, but also cultural insights firm.

Brian: I'm totally geeking out by that, by the way.

Phillip: Oh, you should be.

Brian: I'm dying. I'm dying. I cannot wait to meet Emily. She's a hero.

Phillip: Totally. And folks like Linda Ong, who's a legend and cofounder of Cultique, which is a cultural insights firm that works with major studios to kind of predict and set and fix future... If you've ever wondered the industry plant terms that people talk about like quiet luxury. Where did that come from? People like Linda think about it a lot and try to make it happen in the world. {laughter} So let's talk about it.

Brian: That's true. That's true.

Phillip: That's so true. The world is like, there is no such thing as an organic trend anymore. We'll ask Linda about some of that. But, also, I'm really excited. Walter Woodman, who's the director and Emmy-winning director over at Shy Kids, which is the creative studio that went viral earlier this year for their Airhead short, produced on Sora, which is the OpenAI video platform. So a lot of amazing people coming, and that's not even half of it. It's not even half of it. If you want to hear from Emily and Linda and Walter, and you do, come on out. Check out the lineup at FutureCommerce.com/VISIONS.

Brian: You know what's so crazy about VISIONS? Is that after VISIONS, we have so many more cool things coming as well? There's no end to the content. The contents must flow.

Phillip: That's right. We're in the content mines, mining the content.

Brian: We are. We are. We are. Because it's really, really going to be fun. We might have a little something cooked up for October.

Phillip: Yes. We do. We have some really interesting stuff. I gave a little preview of some of that in our fall preview episode. So if you want to know what's coming, go check that out, but some spooky things on the horizon for the month of October. You know what else is spooky, Brian?

Brian: What? What's spooky?

Phillip: Trademark and trade dress infringement lawsuits from brands who themselves are trademark and trade dress infringers.

Brian: {laughter}

Phillip: Potential. No. I'm just kidding. I don't know if that's true or not, but...

Brian: I like your speaking.

Phillip: I'm speaking legalese. I am not a lawyer. This is not legal content that you should be taking seriously. But it turns out that Muddy Bites has now sued competitor Just The Fun Part, which, by the way, these two names are fantastic.

Brian: True. True. True.

Phillip: True. Yeah. So Muddy Bites, which had another name prior, which again, if you want to go back...

Brian: Drumstick. Sorry. Sorry.

Phillip: No. Not Drumstick. Nestle would not like that. But Muddy Bites' former name, I'm going to Google it while we're speaking. They have sort of blackholed it. It definitely had a former name. And now somehow in Google Gemini, they have tricked it into saying it's never had a former name, but it definitely had a former name.

Brian: Woah. Is this... Are we having a Mandela effect a moment here?

Phillip: We might be. We absolutely might be.

Brian: Or wait. Does AI, is that how we've had things appear? AI is making us all have the Mandela effect now?

Phillip: You know what? It could be. But that rebrand of Muddy Bites is something that I'm old enough to remember, and you cannot trick me. But at any rate, I do think that there is a really interesting thing happening in this lawsuit because a lot of the creative in the complaint is trying to say that not only are they copying the product, which itself is like unbundling of the Nestle Drumstick.

Brian:  Deconstruction.

Phillip:  Yeah. There are two businesses in this world. Some bundling and some unbundling.

Brian:  It looks more like it got stuck into a shrinker or something.

Phillip:  It's like it's lopped off. It's a circumcised Nestle Drumstick.

Brian:  {laughter} Just went there.

Phillip:  Just went totally. I went all the way there. So it's just the tip of it. And they have a, {laughter} the comparison in the packaging trade dress and infringing product is saying, like, well, they've copied our package. Well, it does. These are both pouches, which is a popular way to have a brand package.

Brian:  Packaged drinks. By the way.

Phillip:  Pouches are a huge thing. They show the brand story side by side about childhoods and the anticipation of a Sunday cone. And then, just like that, in one brand story from 2021, it says, "And just like that, Muddy Bites was born." And on the side by side, it says, "And just like that, Just The Fun Part was born." Then they have a social media post from 2021 and 2022 that shows the, what's it called? A pie chart. It's like showing how excited are you to eat one of these? And anyway, the infringement is this alleged infringement is just the latest in what I think, you know, Jared Steffes and Tyler Devos had tried to position as, like you know, they had this product innovation, and they've tried to position others like Just The Fun Part, which had better distribution in retail doors like Costco and Publix. They tried to position them as the knockoff. And this seems to be yet just the next step in that campaign.

Brian: It's funny. This is almost like... Did you ever see Us by Jordan Peele?

Phillip: Oh, it spooked me out big time. I didn't make it through that film.

Brian: Oh, you didn't make it through? Oh, never mind.

Phillip: I can't do spiritual scariness. There's something about it that just is too much.

Brian: No, but it's like...

Phillip: Give me a slasher film. I can do that.

Brian: It's actually got some really funky stuff going on that is probably not what you expected in the end, actually.

Phillip: Do they eat Muddy Bites during the film?

Brian: Maybe.

Phillip: I would never know. You could tell me yes, and I believe you because I didn't make it through it.

Brian: They eat Muddy Bite knockoffs. {laughter}

Phillip: Wow. Well, I don't know if Jordan Peele would be an expert witness on this case or not, but we'll find out.

Brian: It'd be cool to have Jordan Peele do a movie about commerce. I feel like he would do a really good job. I feel like there is a movie there, and I want to watch it.

Phillip: Another lawsuit that came up in the CPG space is Chubby. The" better for you version of an Uncrustable," was recently sued by the J. M. Smucker's Corporation. Among things listed in the complaint is they don't like being called names in social media posts. So that's funny, as well. But, anyway, I think that the CPG space right now is rife with a lot of lawsuits, which means I think it's entering a new final boss era.

Brian: Yeah. CPG and also social, I feel like is in a lot of froth right now when it comes to lawsuits.

Phillip: Totally.

Brian: I wonder if we're about to see social completely change as a result because originality is going to be a necessity in order to avoid a lawsuit. And so.

Phillip: That's true. Yeah.

Brian: I think what you said about  identity is actually going to be a necessity, not just for keeping your identity unique, but also to keep yourself from being copied, or to also make sure that you're not copying anybody else. Because at this point, there's so much content out there, and we're so incepted by so much content that it's very easy if you fall into just doing things the way the industry is doing them that you actually might accidentally copy something.

Phillip:  Wow.

Brian:  That seems like a possibility. So if you're just putting out the same thing that everyone else is, that could end up getting you in trouble. And so the only way to protect yourself is to be extremely different.  This is a weird world we're going into. It got weird.

Phillip: It could help.  It could help to be more creative. I do think that if copyright lawsuits were this prevalent during the early age of the Internet, we wouldn't have the Internet we have today.

Brian: Yeah. I agree.

Phillip: I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's I think that would be true. By the way, both of these stories were found through our friend and well, one time, podcast guest, Rob Freund, who has one of the most amazing Twitter accounts. He's @RobertFreundLaw on Twitter.

Brian: Gotta love Robert's Twitter.

Phillip: Follow him. It's big time. Be's big time these days. He had a podcast guest appearance. It was pretty good recently talking about some of the stuff. So go check him out. But just to kinda close the loop on this. Yeah. Originality, creativity, they've never been more needed, but the pace at which you need to produce it, I think is far harder now than ever before and is almost into the realm of the inhuman. No person, no one person can generate that amount of power.

Brian: This gets back to our last episode about extension of self, and I think that that's like keeping your AI extension of self up to date is going to be as pretty important.

Phillip: Yeah.

Brian: If you go into a different mode, you need to train your AI as fast as possible on what that new mode is. And, man, I know we're projecting a little bit further out right now, but it's actually not that far out.

Phillip: I can't agree any harder. Okay. Let's take a sharp left turn. We recently went to Shoptoberfest, and they had sort of a podcasters row, sort of like an old, you know, like an old press room with radio DJs all kinda doing interviews. It was like a junket.

Brian: Podcasting. Podcasting.

Phillip: And, you know, there were some... Dude, there were some legends in that room, people that I look up to. And I mean, Ben Marks was there, obviously. Brent Peterson, some old timers. Scott Osman from Always Off Brand was there.

Brian: Man, what a lineup. What a lineup. And there was more. There was more. There were a lot of people there.

Phillip: There were a lot of content creators, some writers, and various folks. I think some actual journalists. Really well covered event. Amazing community event. But you got to sit down and have a conversation about some research that we recently led point on.

Brian: Yes. The Honest Truth. It's the report we just released with Shopware.

Phillip: What's the ultimate title? Do you remember?

Brian: Lies, Damn Lies, and RFPs.

Phillip: That's right. Not quite as Google friendly, I don't think.

Brian: No. Probably not. But the report turned out super well. Uncovered a whole bunch of how fraught it is to make decisions around commerce software. Super, super interesting. I know we covered a little bit about it in our last episode, and you just got to sit down with a couple of incredible industry leaders, and talk about that process, and I got to sit down with two more as well. So we're actually about to listen in on my conversation with Mike Wattier from TPBI and also Jeremy Noonan, who's the Managing Director over at TORQ, and have a great discussion about their experiences with RFP selection processes and software purchasing processes. The funny thing about them is Jeremy is from an agency, and Mike is a merchant. And so getting those sort of two different perspectives, we didn't have software in that conversation. You got the software conversation.

Phillip: Totally.

Brian: And I do think it is such an interesting thing.  One of the things we found in the report is that agencies overwhelmingly do have the trust of the merchants they work with, brands and retailers they work with. I think it was, like, 77% do trust their agency, but only in 5 brands or retailers actually end up using their agency account manager to help them make a decision about what software they pick.   Such a unique dichotomy, and I think that uncovering that is something that I think there's just so many more truths like that in there that could actually help brands and retailers make better decisions about their software that they pick.

Phillip:  Alright. Without any further ado, let's go to that conversation. If you're watching the YouTube, you can listen to it by subscribing to our podcast. Go check out all of the episodes of our podcast. There's literally 4  of them nowadays. Wherever podcasts are found, go look for Future Commerce, or you can go check out FutureCommerce.com, and we have all of our podcasts listed there as well. Alright. Let's go to that conversation right after the bump.

Phillip: Spooky Commerce. It's a first for us in a new segment we're calling Spooky Commerce. And here to help guide us through this very spooky journey for the month of October is producer Sarah. Sarah Roulette is our producer based in Northern California. Welcome to the show. I think it's your first time on.

Sarah: Yes. I think it is my first time on. Thank you. Thank you. I'm very excited to get spooky today.

Phillip: Get spooky. You selected a few very spooky things for us this month. Brian, are you kind of a superstitious or sort of like a... You into the spooky stuff?

Brian: Yeah. Well, obviously, a lot of it's stupid and fun and but are there creepy things out there? Yes.

Phillip: Yeah.

Brian: I think there are.

Phillip: You live in the woods. I hope you're afraid of some creepy things in the woods. I'm sure.

Brian: Definitely. Definitely some creepy things in the woods. That's true.

Phillip: Sarah, there are all sorts of cryptids and sasquatch and everything up in your neck of the woods.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. For sure.

Brian: We live in sasquatch country out here. Let me tell you.

Sarah: % Yeah. Pacific Northwest for sure. That in the Appalachian? Appalachian mountains?

Phillip: Yes. That's right. It's absolutely true. That's why I don't believe they really exist because I think if they did, there would be more commerce around it. It's like, oh, this was a...

Brian: There's a lot of commerce around the sasquatch. No. That's not true. There's sasquatch.

Phillip: There's Dr Squatch soap.

Brian: Yes. True.

Phillip: That's a thing.

Sarah: That's true.

Brian: And there's, like, all kinds of little stops along the way in the mountains out here that are sasquatch related and inspire quite a bit of commerce. In fact, one of Seattle's most famous artists who's done a bunch of stuff around, does a bunch of Sasquatches. His name is Henry. He started Enumclaw. He's super famous all over Seattle.

Phillip: You know what I did? You know what my mistake here was? Was mentioning cryptids and Sasquatch, because we have nothing... That has nothing to do with anything that we're going to talk about. {laughter}

Brian: What are you talking about? Sasquatch is spooky, man. Let me tell you.

Phillip: It's fear of the unknown.

Brian: Fear of the unknown. It's true. Actually, my uncle, one of my uncles, believes that he had a Sasquatch encounter. That's true.

Sarah: No way.

Brian: Oh, yeah.

Sarah: Oh, wow.

Brian: And it was it freaked him out. Trust me. When you encounter something that you don't know what it is, that's...

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Brian: That that is what you call freaky, spooky. Yeah. Spooky.

Sarah: Especially in the woods.

Phillip: I don't... {laughter}

Brian: Especially in the woods.

Phillip: I don't know where this is going anymore.

Brian: I mean, this is spooky commerce, man.

Phillip: This is my fault. I did this. Okay. Sarah.

Sarah: Okay.

Phillip: You've selected a few stories for us. For the first Spooky Commerce, get us into it.

Sarah: Yes. Okay. Very hard left from Sasquatches, but the first story I pulled from the web, I don't know if you guys have heard of this before. I don't think you have. This is La Pascualita. She is a very famous mannequin. She lives in the storefront of a bridal store in Chihuahua, Mexico, and legend has it, she's not a mannequin at all. She is an embalmed corpse.

Phillip: Well, hold on. Wait. Wait. Hold on.

Brian: Why is this? This isn't... This is not spooky. This is just creepy and gross. Yeah.

Phillip: That's f'd up commerce. That's what that is.

Sarah: I think that's a little spooky. Yeah. {laughter}

Brian: Somebody has mental health challenges and did something that's not good.

Phillip: Wait. Hold on. So okay. This is, so it's like an urban legend almost.

Sarah: Yes. This is a very famous urban legend. The story kinda circulates every year on the web, usually around this time. But the background of this is, legend has it, back in, like, 1930 something, I want to say, the owner of the bridal shop's daughter passed away, get this, the night before her wedding due to a black widow spider bite. And then mysteriously, a few days later or a few weeks later, this mannequin appears in the storefront who looks exactly like the daughter.

Phillip: I swear to everything that this is the plot of Little Shop of Horrors, but it's a plant and not a mannequin out there. Okay. This is a known thing.

Brian: Wait. So wait. Did they did they verify? When did you say this is oh, how long ago? Did they verify? Did anybody go in and verify?

Sarah: Yeah. That's kind of the question. So I feel like that's the whole urban legend of it all because a lot of people just choose to believe. She first appeared in the 1930s. She stayed in the storefront for, like, 80 something years. And then in 2017 was moved to an art exhibit. So I don't know if they moved her back. I don't know the state of La Pascualta now.

Brian: Wait. If she got moved to an art exhibit, then they should know at this point.

Phillip: Somebody at some point could have figured this out. Brian, have you seen a picture of this thing?

Brian: Send me the link, I guess. I don't know. Alright.

Phillip: You got it here.

Brian: This is not up my alley. This is not my thing.

Phillip: Alright. The link is in the chat. The link is in the chat.

Brian: Okay. Alright.

Phillip: This is legitimately one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen. Like, it's totally...

Brian: I hope this is... Yeah. This I hope this is fake.

Phillip: That hand is... I don't think Leonardo da Vinci could make this hand this perfect.

Brian: Nope. If that's wax, then keep me away from wax museums.

Phillip: Okay. So, Sarah, what do you think?

Sarah: Okay. Before I started researching this, I was a % on board, totally believed she was real. After researching this, I don't think she's real. I think the store owners are geniuses. This is a brilliant marketing technique. Wouldn't necessarily recommend it...

Brian: Capitalize on your daughter's death, that's the brilliant marketing technique.

Sarah: This has driven so much, not just foot traffic, but online web traffic to the store. This particular bridal shop in Chihuahua, Mexico gets Googled probably every day. So many people come to visit her. And something that I read in one of the articles was that brides believe that if they purchase whatever dress La Pascualita is wearing, it will bring them good fortune on their wedding day.

Phillip: : Stop. It's a merchandising thing too. I didn't even think about that.

Brian: : So wait. Hold on. What I think I'm hearing here is if brands just go do something that's really screwed up that people are freaked out by, that's a great merchandising strategy.

Phillip: : That's the Mr Beast merchandising strategy. That's just late capitalism, Brian.

Brian: : This is this is MSCHF. This is MSCHF is what it is.

Phillip: : That's true too. So can you make that more specific? So what you're insinuating, Sarah, is that they dress the mannequin like any other mannequin, and that moves merchandise. Right?

Sarah: : Which is kind of interesting because if you have a dress that's not selling, you can just slap it on La Pascualita. And then, you know, the thing about that, though, I've found some incongruent quotes. There are some quotes that say she has been wearing the same dress the whole time. I don't really believe that because I think the dress would show a lot of wear and tear that it wasn't showing in some of the photos. There is a quote from a former employee who allegedly used to change the outfits on her twice a week, which insinuates that she would change dresses.

Phillip:   Sure.

Sarah:   But this employee wholeheartedly believed that La Pascualita was a person.

Phillip: Wow. Yeah.

Brian: So wait. So where does that believe you? You believe that she was a person?

Sarah: I don't.

Brian: Okay.

Sarah: I don't think she... I think it's a very, very lifelike looking mannequin. But I don't think it's really a body. I kinda I went a little deep into this. I started looking into, like, is it even possible to preserve? My algorithm's a little creeepy little bit right now.

Brian: Yeah. You're oh, man. Oh, don't go down that algo hole.

Phillip: Yeah. You don't you don't search La Pascualita on main. What are you doing?

Brian: No. Where's your burner device?

Phillip: I do want to explore this a little bit because there's a little urban legend around ecommerce and bridal shops too. So I saw this come around in two or three different cycles, Brian, over our agency days where you would have the white whale, the Ahab of it all was if you could get David's bridle, like, that's the biggest sale you could ever make.

Brian: That was it? That was the one?

Phillip: Yeah. Because it's like an unfathomably large market. Bridal is... No. Seriously, bridal is huge.

Brian: I know it's huge. They did go bankrupt. You know?

Phillip: That's probably because they weren't on the right ecommerce platform, Brian. {laughter}

Brian: Or they tried to replatform too many times.

Phillip: Not a single chuckle from you. Okay. If only we had caught the whale.

Brian: That's spooky.

Phillip: Do we do you have any ideas there around the other things that happen around the bridal industry that might be similarly spooky? I think just having the conversation around the way that we're shopping for what we're actually trying to buy is the story here. Right? What we're trying to get is something deeper beyond just I like this dress. It's not say yes to the dress. It's like there's something else.

Brian: It has a story behind it. It has something important behind it. I think it's true for a lot of marriage and anniversary purchases as well. Like, there's a whole, like, rhyming scheme. I don't even know what it is. Different anniversaries. You're supposed to buy certain things for good luck. There's a lot of luck and superstition based purchasing habits, some of which we don't even know are tied back to some of those superstitious stories or lore aspects of the world there. I think that there's all kinds of things like that that we do that are tied to these urban legends or legends. Urban legends and regular legends that we buy for. Or maybe not even legended. In some ways, just even doing something for someone on their birthday is part of their story. I guess it's not spooky. It's not a spooky story, but things that have to do with deep...

Phillip: That's just an outgrowth of capitalism, and that is spooky, actually.Birthdays

Brian: Birthdays are spooky?

Phillip: Anniversaries, the whole thing. Yeah. Christmas too.

Sarah: Christmas too. Can't you argue Christmas is literally built around lore of Saint Nick, and it's whole traditions that we do.

Brian: Valentine's Day.

Phillip: But we don't weekend at Bernie's Santa every year. That's what's happening to this poor embalmed...

Brian: There has been a lot of spooky Santa stuff that's been happening in the culture lately.

Phillip: That's true.

Brian: Violent night?

Phillip: I'm into it. Last word on La Pascualita. Sarah, any final thoughts?

Sarah: I think this is just one of the most fascinating stories I've read. I think the shop owners... From my research, and this is also why I don't necessarily believe all this is true, I think they are capitalizing on it. They definitely feed into the story, the urban legend. There's a huge poster outside of the window where she's posted up that has, it's titled The Legend of La Pascualita. So, you know, they want to drive traffic. They want to encourage this. And I will say that the art exhibit that she got moved to was exhibiting urban legends of Mexico City and surrounding cities. So I I think there's a huge appreciation for urban legend and the lore behind it, and I just I see a lot of tie into that.

Phillip: Yeah. And strangely, the personhood granted by the story because you keep saying she. Yeah. It's a mannequin. It's not a person.

Sarah: Yeah. It's almost like...

Brian: Might have been. At one point.

Phillip: That's spooky. We'll never know.

Brian: Maybe that was part of the conditions of handing it over to the museum is that they wouldn't test it to see.

Phillip: No one's going to tell. I won't tell if you don't. Love it. Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you.

Brian:  I'm here live with Mike Wattier and Jeremy Noonan. Guys, welcome to the show.

Mike Wattier:  Thank you.

Jeremy Noonan:  Glad to be here.

Brian:  Yeah. Why don't you each take a moment to introduce yourselves.

Mike Wattier:  My name is Mike. I'm the Ecommerce Manager for South Beach Brands. We're wholesale distribution, B2B, B2C, DTC, and I'm happy to be here.

Jeremy Noonan: Awesome. I'm Jeremy Noonan, Managing Partner at TORQ, system integrator for both Pimcore and Shopware, located in Canada, working all across North America.

Brian: Amazing. And both of you have had a chance to take an our early look at the report that we just released. And so I'd love to take a few minutes with you to kind of talk about what it's like right now to make a selection of commerce software. I also come out of the agency ecosystem. So, Jeremy, I really resonate with you in that. And my cofounder, Phillip, did as well. He was also at a brand for many years. And so we've both seen and experienced some of the challenges that merchants have when they come to make a selection of any kind of software, honestly. The more complicated it is, the harder it gets. And people take all kinds of approaches from RFPs to direct proposals. Sometimes they'll just go direct to a technology company and hear what they have to say and maybe buy from them without even really looking around at other options. I've seen that before.

Jeremy Noonan: Which is great as an agency. {laughter}

Brian: Right. It's great as an agency. Totally. I've seen the opposite where, you know, they'll go evaluate 10 different options and run them through very thorough RFPs. And so as we get into some of the details of the report here, I'd love to just get each of your initial perspective on the state of purchasing software in ecommerce. Mike, why don't we start with you?

Mike Wattier: Okay. Purchasing ecommerce software, developing a stack is brutal right now. It's extremely difficult. And I thought your report really kinda hit on that about the first paragraph, the transparency comparison between purchasing ecommerce software and politics. {laughter} I thought that was spot on. The landscape is just completely in flux right now. You have platforms that don't know which way to go, so they rely upon their third party module ecosystems, and so they tell you, "Oh, yes. It can do that." And but then you're involved not just with the platform provider. You're involved with 15 different module providers. And it makes the water really muddy. It's very murky. It's difficult to know who to trust.

Brian: Yeah. Jeremy, well, how about you? As an agency, what have you seen?

Jeremy Noonan: I certainly know what Mike's talking about in that last statement there. And as an agency, we've had to wade through those waters ourselves to land on what's our stack going to be, what are we going to recommend because our clients trust us to have a beat on the market, and they want us to help inform and educate them. And it's tough with all this noise in the market. Where are you going to focus your efforts? You don't have enough time to thoroughly evaluate everything, every single permutation of these bits of software. You gotta learn how to weed things out quick. You need to learn what is the client actually asking for as you hit on in the RFP. Like, that's going to miss so many times.

Brian: Yeah.

Jeremy Noonan: And oftentimes, depending on the client, they download a template for this RFP with a checklist of items, and they don't even necessarily evaluate against their own business cases. Is this what I actually am trying to achieve, or is this just, you know, the checklist you have to do to to run through the paces? And we get trapped in those processes on RFPs.

Mike Wattier: Trapped is a great way to describe it because as merchants, a lot of merchants don't really have anybody on staff that has the technical expertise to be able to translate the business vocabulary to the technical vocabulary so that an agency can come and say, "Okay. Now I understand your business model. This is where we need to go," and that's always been... That was a real challenge for us in ia lot of ways because we are multifaceted. We're B2B. We're B2C. We're DTC. And our future plans dictate that we don't have a stack that determines our business model, that we determine our business model, and the stack conforms to that.

Jeremy Noonan: Yeah.

Brian: Yeah. That makes complete sense. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges as well. Oftentimes, I've seen many merchants come to the table. You have a set of business needs that you come with, but you also have a set of legacy software. And one of the things that often happens is, let's just pretend you went out to three of the big ecommerce platform providers out there. And I'm not limiting this discussion just to ecommerce platforms. But oftentimes, what will happen is you'll say, "Oh, well, I need these set of features," and they'll come back and be like, "Okay. Yeah. That that sounds great. We've got 75% of those natively. And then the other 25% require a connector, and it's just an installation of a connector, and that'll cover it. And all you have to do is click a button, and then it's plug and play." But, actually, when we get into it, it's more like plug and pray.

Jeremy Noonan: {laughter} Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Wattier: That describes it exactly. I mean, we go through that because we touch so many different ecosystems. Content management systems are no different. When you go speak to an agency to help you set up a CMS of some kind, their first recommendation is always going to be WordPress, but WordPress is just WordPress. And that consolidation that we went through in ecommerce platform several years ago, like a decade ago, the market consolidated. Content management systems did the same thing. Everything consolidated to just one solution, and what do you pick then?

Jeremy Noonan: Yep. Totally. Yeah. Absolutely. And like you said, on the integration side, is improving. The tools in the ecosystem are improving, but it doesn't take away, speaking from an agency perspective, to do your due diligence, to understand what is the nuance in all of this. Okay. Sure. We have a connector to go to your Microsoft NAV or Dynamics, but the client didn't tell you that they've built three custom modules on top of it.

Brian: {laughter}

Jeremy Noonan: Exactly. And those three custom modules are the most important part of what's driving all their order flows or their product flows and all those different things. And, yeah, you can check a box and say, okay. I've got this connector, but you gotta learn their business. You gotta learn what are you doing. What's your process? What's your flow?

Brian: What are some of the ways that you as an agency sort of try to get ahead of that when you're helping them think through what they need to do?

Jeremy Noonan: Well, obviously you have to win the business first or what we often pitch to clients, and I think we have a 99% success rate in that this leads to an implementation. We start with a scoping project, and that scoping project is usually about 10% of the budget of the overall project. Through that, we hit on a number of things. We want to do your data mapping. Where is the data coming from? Where is it going to? What's complicated in the middle? So map data, map the integrations, any of the other pieces of the ecom project, what are your content pieces that you're worried about? We have clients in ecom, they don't really care a lot about content. It's not a content driven ecom experience. They just have simple products. You want to purchase them, drive it through. You have some people where brochures and flyers and more interactive ecom experiences are important. That completely changes the scope of the ecom project. What tools are you using to feed those systems? How is that going to integrate into the ecom platform? So we like to do a lot of leg work. They end up being sometimes six to eight week projects ahead of implementation. But when we go into it, we're giving the client a very clear, "Here's what we're going to do. We've seen all these things. We've learned about your business..." And then whenever we get to the actual implementation project, we're not giving them a project scope and budget that's based on how we feel or what we want. No. We evaluate it and this is what it's going to be. So the scoping initiative's a big part of how we try to get ahead of that.

Brian: It's interesting, though, there's well, this process has gotten so bad. We found in our survey, 82% of the merchants we survey expected the implementation to differ drastically from the sales promises. And 77% of merchants do trust their agency partners, but only in 5 leverage their agency account person in the evaluation process. And so this is a really huge discrepancy between who they trust more and how they go make decisions.

Jeremy Noonan: I was just going to say quickly. That's an interesting stat to me because in our RFP when we're in an RFP, we will lean on our vendors to help us through it. But  4: ]we take the bull by the horns on that one. We want to drive that process because oftentimes, the people that are developing these products, they're not in the trenches doing the implementation, so they're not always fully aligned.

Mike Wattier: And that's kind of the thing from the merchant side that it it's difficult because we all know that the person that I'm talking to on a Zoom meeting when they're pitching me the software is not person who's writing the code.

Brian: Exactly.

Mike Wattier: And I'm never going to be able to talk to that person who's writing the code. So I think there's a barrier there that as merchants, business people know. It's unspoken.

Brian: Is that you're talking agency, or are you talking tech right now?

Mike Wattier: Both.

Brian: Both. Okay. Now that is an interesting thing. I mean, just coming from my background, one of the things that we really emphasized was getting our developers in front of the clients up front.

Jeremy Noonan: Yep.

Brian: I think you're right. I think there's a lot of agencies that are out there that don't know that clients just want to get into the details and get in front of someone that's actually going to be doing the work. I love that call. I'm sorry I cut you off. Yeah.

Mike Wattier: No. No. It's okay. I mean, for us, especially, because our business, we're in a regulated industry. What we do is extremely important. The details matter. No agency, I don't expect any agency to come into our business environment and understand what we do for a living.

Brian: Yeah.

Phillip: There's no way. We've been doing this for 10 years. We're one of a very few number of companies that can do it and know how to do it, and we do it very well. You're not going to come in in six weeks and know my business model.

Mike Wattier: Right.

Brian: So I think that's where a lot of that stat comes from is because the business knows that you're never going to get it. And so they're just trying to get enough information into your hands to be able to get the things done that we know that you need to know.

Brian: Totally.

Mike Wattier: And to the businesses downfall in a lot of in a lot of points, because I agree that there needs to be that translation, that close hand and glove working relationship between the business and the integrator, the business and the agencies, and the business and the developers to make that best outcome.

Brian: Totally. And that's the thing I think that's so crazy about some merchants' approach to making decisions around software purchasing. At least I find this to be nuts. They go to the technology companies first almost always. And then the danger of that is they often get introduced to agencies by the technology company. And usually when that happens, you're going to get the same bias as you would have directly from a technology company as the agency that they push you over to. And so you're not getting the value of having established a relationship with your agency first and said, "Hey. I need you to help guide me. Let's learn about each other. Let's make sure that you understand my business upfront, and then we can go talk about, "Okay, well, what technology fits this model a little bit better?'" It just feels like that would be a more independent approach. This is, again, my bias.

Jeremy Noonan: Yep. Yeah. And if I tie that back to the scoping thing where I was just talking about a minute ago, one of our promises or one of our offerings out of that initiative is at the end of it, it's all agnostic. It's all about learning the business. It's learning the process, and it's learning what you actually need. And our promise to clients that are engaging on those is you could take the deliverables of this and use it to implement a competitive product to what we use.

Brian: Totally. Yes.

Jeremy Noonan: Because what we're learning to discover, you know, if we say, "Pick any ecom platform," we're not trying to learn how do we implement x into your business. We're trying to learn what processes do your business need and how do you achieve those using technology. So the output of those are agnostic, and it's all about learning the business problems.

Brian: Yeah, I love that more agnostic approach upfront, especially. I think that could cut off some of these misaligned expectations. Mike, what do you think about that?

Mike Wattier: 8: ] I think there's value in that because when we've gone through the selection process a number of times. And then in my background as a developer, I've been on the other side of it as well. So I tend to look at the more you can take a business model, put it in the abstract, and then overlay and evaluate the platforms in the abstract, and then try and do your gap analysis. What's missing? What's easier? What's the heavy lift? What's the light lift? What's it going to cost me to fill the gaps? That's where from a business perspective, what's it going to cost me to fill the gaps? And that's how we did our evaluation is looking at it, where are we now? Where are we going to be in three years? Because we're going to go there no matter what platform we're on.

Brian: Right.

Mike Wattier: We're not going to let the platform impede our progress.

Brian: Which let's get back to that in a second.

Mike Wattier: Yeah. So being able to come in and talk to an integrator or talk to the platform, and do it in the abstract, to do it the agnostic way, that's really kind of the approach that's missing in a lot of the arena out there.

Brian: Yeah. No. And so one of the other things we found was 81% of merchants prioritize speed to market, but at the exact same time, 86% emphasize the importance of customization. And this seems almost at odds with each other, although that's not exactly true. But I think one of the questions that businesses have to ask themselves is, do I want to try and bend my business to the software or bend my the software to my business? And when and how and why and which software should I take that approach on?

Mike Wattier:  Speed equals money, how fast do you want to go?

Brian: Yeah.

Mike Wattier: That is the... I have been reciting that for years because that's always what leadership misses.

Brian:  Totally.

Mike Wattier:    Leadership doesn't understand the intricacies of the actual work itself.   They just understand that downtime costs money, and failure is not an option. And that's the part that where we need a customizable. We need the flexibility. They know they need it, which is why I think leadership tends to make decisions to lean towards, "Okay. Well, let's put the square peg in the round hole and just change our business model around the software." And that's why I think they make a lot of those decisions because   they're not getting that unvarnished truth about how to fill the gaps properly.  

Jeremy Noonan:  I think that's a responsibility of the agency partner whenever you're looking at these projects because the business needs it. But do they need it for that first sale through the register? Probably not. Every broad feature that they're talking about, they want in their ecomm platform. So let's lay it out. Let's look at the phases of this project. What gets things flowing? What gets the orders out the door? Okay. Shipping's a little bit clunky. We got a few manual processes we gotta do in here, but it's moving, and we're talking with our partner. We know how we're going to solve it. We don't love our payment integration. We don't love, you know, our search. Whatever it might happen to be inside of your ecom, you gotta decide what's a day problem and what's a one year problem, three year problem. So you gotta look at it from that broader picture so that you can have that speed to market without sacrificing too much that you paint yourself in the corner.

Brian:  And that's a real challenge because sometimes stuff, you know, you have to leave it as is when you're making the change.

Jeremy Noonan:  Yeah.

Brian:  And that's a hard feeling to leave something where you're like, I know this can be better. It should be better. It's not even good right now. I don't even want it to be the way that it is right now, but we need to do this in a phased approach. Change management is actually as much a part of this as anything else is. Mike, I'm sure you've seen this a few times over.

Mike Wattier: Yeah. And the approach of, you know, what can we go live with? Right? Because in the business, the anxiety level, the closer you get to launch just goes up dramatically. It is a constant worry. What happens at the cutover? And what are we going to look like that day? And that day is always... I'm bald because I've done this. {laughter}

Jeremy Noonan: There's sleepless nights on the agency side too.

Brian: Oh, for sure.

Mike Wattier: Right. And I think that's the trust level between the business and the integrator has to be at just the utmost because you are placing the jobs. You're placing the jobs of your employees in the hands of the system integrator for that day when you go live. And then what is the day feature set, the day 10 feature set, the day 90 feature set?

Jeremy Noonan: Yep.

Mike Wattier: How do you select when you are going to launch feature deficient? How do you fill that gap? How do you map that out? What's the most cost effective way to be feature deficient on day 1? And then day 90, we can start introducing that change management.

Jeremy Noonan: Yep. Yep. Absolutely.

Brian: In fact, one of the things that was another huge data point from the study was 89% emergence rate ease of integration as crucial, {laughter} and yet it was one of the biggest gap points. Integration's almost always one of the things where expectations were misaligned. And so, Jeremy, you started in the integration space. That's sort of how TORQ...

Jeremy Noonan: Yeah, the way I always describe it is we got dragged forward in ecommerce. We started doing back end ERP integrations and portals, got us into product data, got us into doing PIM, got us doing into channel syndication, which then eventually got us into doing ecommerce. So, yeah, we get dragged the whole way from the back to the front. And through that process, we've seen a lot of integration done in a lot of different ways. And I tell you, that's something that always requires a team and a lot of communication. We're an agency partner. We're working with all sorts of different clients. There's as many ERPs out there as there are ecommerce platforms. So for us as an agency to say we're experts in these 14 ERPs, well, that's just not true.

Brian: Yeah.

Jeremy Noonan: And you need to know that they have the competency on their side to tell you, like, "Okay, what are the little tiny details that only three guys inside of this company of 5  that you're working with understand about the ERP?" Oh. And you've gotta find out how to pull that detail out. Because when you don't, you turn that thing live, and all of a sudden, you've got data flowing in a bad way.

Mike Wattier: And then you're getting phone calls from the warehouse and they can't deliver because there's a plus one on the phone number. I mean, there's a lot of there's it is about integration. It is about understanding. And I'm curious about how many businesses actually understand their own data. And so that's really the other thing is how prepared are these businesses to migrate. And when they do reach out to the system integrators, I tend to think that merchants need to interview the SIs before they talk to the platforms about who they prefer. I think they need to interview both independently.

Brian: Yeah.

Mike Wattier: I think they need to interview the platform providers.

Brian: Yeah. Because the flip side of that is actually, sometimes there are agencies out there that say they can use a platform when really they have no idea what they're talking about. So what are some tips to help that are like markers that you can start to see sort of through some of that? I'm sure both of you have seen this.

Mike Wattier: I apologize to the agencies out there. From a business, you know, you're marrying this platform.

Brian: Yeah.

Mike Wattier: You're marrying the platform, and you have to prioritize your relationship with the platforms and the service providers that you how are signing these three and five year contracts because that's what it is. You're signing to get the kind of deals, to get the kind of longevity and meet your business goals. You have to be on this platform for three to five years to allow it to work and to honestly get the pricing that you need, because that's the other thing. It's gotta be about the pricing as well. And then you have to alternately have that other relationship with your integrator. But in the end, agencies have to understand that they've gotta continue to really... You've gotta be trustworthy, build that trust with me, be that guy. I'm not looking for a friendship. I'm not looking for anything like that. I'm looking for someone who's going to come and tell me the truth, the cold, hard like we were talking earlier. Rip the Band Aid off truth. What's broken so that I know what to do tomorrow to conduct my business so that I can continue to write you a check. And then the business has to know how to manage both of those relationships because in the end, the platform is the one that I'm staying on now. I might change that at the end of the five year contract.

Brian: Yeah.

Mike Wattier: So from the business perspective, it is a bit of a dance.

Brian: It is a dance.

Phillip: Keep them at arm's length, but still hug them.

Brian: How do you know which one's the right... So you're right. So I totally agree with you. The platform's the one you're stuck on for a long time. The question is how do you pick the right one? Because if what platforms tell you, and I think this is something that was clear in the survey as well, is going to be biased towards them. They're going to say, "Oh, yeah. That integration doesn't take so long. It's just a plug and play." It's often a little bit harder to discern, especially in the context of an RFP. If anyone's ever done an RFP, they know it's like you've had those different things that's like out of the box, customization required

Jeremy Noonan: The whole spectrum.

Brian: Yeah. Third party integration. And sometimes it's like third party integration plus customization.

Jeremy Noonan: Yeah. Yeah.

Brian: And so when you get those responses back from the platforms themselves, they're going to try to make it as favorable to them as possible. So how do you know what's real?

Jeremy Noonan: Well, from our perspective on the RFP process, as an agency, we actually want to own that process. So whenever we get that spreadsheet that comes along with, you know, check here for a 5, 4, 3, 2, on whether you fit this feature, you can almost guarantee that whether you want to read it or not, you're going to get another big side document from us, or we're going to start adding our own columns to that Excel sheet because it's never just there's no binary answer to those things. Do you do this? Do you do that? That is almost never true.

Brian: Should we throw RFPs out the window?

Mike Wattier: Yes.

Brian: Oh, there it is. I love it. Why Mike?

Mike Wattier: They are a trap. They are a trap for the business, they're a trap for the integrator, and they're a trap for the platform.

Brian: How do you especially as you start to get up to scale, one of the things that's really challenging is being able to communicate things back up the chain to the rest of the parts of the business. And one of the reasons why businesses do use RFP is because their purchasing departments require having an RFP. If you are stuck with an RFP, what are some ways that you can help sort of uncover? So if you can throw them out, throw them out. If you can't throw them out, is there any hope for you?

Mike Wattier:  If you can't throw them out, then you need to go talk to the boss, and you need to tell them that the system that they're requiring is going to hurt you in the wallet three and five and ten years from now. You're never going to recover in this. If you can't move fast without breaking things, you're not going to survive. Now we're a mid market company...

Brian:  Yeah.

Mike Wattier:  And in that mid market mindset, we'll get big one day. I mean, that's we're not in this to go small.

Brian:  I mean, mid market's a very big chunk of our audience right now, so you're speaking to the right people.

Mike Wattier:  If you haven't communicated ahead of time to leadership, I'm the ecommerce manager. I have a boss. Alright? The president of our company, he's very adept at understanding the business, but we have conversations, very in-depth, long conversations for many, many months before we even talked to anybody. And that internal communication has to be the first step in it in understanding what's the process that we have to follow in order to give us the best chance of success, the best outcome possible. And if you're not doing that, if you're following it just because that's the way you've always done things, you're going to lose.

Brian:  Game over. Yeah. We're running up against time here because we've got a few more people we're going to be bringing on. But Jeremy, any last words on this?

Jeremy Noonan:  I mean, of course, it was a pleasure to be here. It's a great conversation to go all through that. Back to your RFP comment. I mean, oftentimes, what are you going to learn in an RFP that you're not going to look at from just going to the features section of each of the different you know, they're all going to say what they do right there. You gotta dig a layer deeper. You gotta really discover the nuance of the problems. No binary answers, and there's no easy answers when it comes to doing this process.

Brian: That's great. That's a great way to leave it. I think, Mike, any last words?

Mike Wattier: No. Just appreciate being here. And for anybody who's going through the process, just learn how to be kind to each other. {laughter}

Brian: I love that.

Mike Wattier: While you rip the Band Aid off and bring the hammer.

Jeremy Noonan: You know what though, Mike? Some of our best clients are the ones that do hold us to the fire too. I love those clients at the end of the day. When you're going to go live and you guys are sweating it up together. You're both in it. You both want to make it happen because I honestly think that if I look back on projects that we've done that I don't feel like were our largest successes, it's when you don't have that shared fear, that shared goal, or when the client just kinda throws it over the fence to you and doesn't take ownership from their side.

Brian: Yeah, I love that. Take ownership, treat each other with respect, and if you're going to do an RFP, if you have to do an RFP, go talk to your boss. Just throw it out the window. {laughter}

Mike Wattier: Tell him this is not the way.

Brian: Well, thank you, guys. This is great. Yeah.

Jeremy Noonan: Pleasure to be here.

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