City Winery

What Experience Taught Me: Scrappiness Scales Brands

Starting brands from scratch or coming in when they are nascent taught me the most about building ecommerce strategy and digital commerce systems.

My first website, Koffeelink, was a coffee trading platform. As a start-up, we had no brand recognition. The key to launching a new brand is choosing the right channels and engaging effectively. Established brands must do the same. But, as a start-up, you have to be more persistent and non-traditional to get noticed. Learning what works and being comfortable pushing the envelope as a start-up taught me what is needed to succeed with more established brands. Growing established brands is also challenging because there is less low-hanging fruit. You need to use the same scrappy start-up techniques to find new growth with larger brands.

What I’ve Learned: Data Alone Isn’t Enough

You need a fine balance of both strong quantitative analytical skills and creativity.

“An ecommerce store must be optimized to drive conversions, but you also need to know when extra copy or extra images won't affect click rates or page load time and that is when you should insert the long story.”

I like to say that people who are good at statistics or economics are good at storytelling and data. Statisticians and economists wouldn't like to hear it, but you need a balance of quantitative and qualitative skills in both those disciplines. If you are just good at math, your statistical analysis will fall flat because it will lack real world context. If you only rely on reading the crowd, you will make huge mistakes that data can help you avoid. You need both a strong quantitative background and creativity.

Customer Balance: Story, Speed and Revenue Alignment

I think the answer to this question is very similar to the above on brand storytelling and data driven e-commerce. An ecommerce store must be optimized to drive conversions, but you also need to know when extra copy or extra images won't affect click rates or page load time and that is when you should insert the long story. Additionally, shorter versions of "the story" need to be peppered throughout the entire customer journey. A customer should not come across any page or section of your website that feels out of place in the greater novel (i.e. website).

Ecommerce Leadership Change: your Story Must Reach AI

AI of course. Individual brands will always need their own website and their own checkout. But, many people will also soon make purchases via AI based on AI overviews. The percentage of people who will do that instead of buying directly from the brand is hard to say and will vary greatly by industry. But it will happen to some extent everywhere. So, we all need to learn how to tell our story to AI so AI can tell it to everyone else.

Leadership Advice: Strengthen What Your Instinct Misses

If math is your strength, talk to more people. If you are a creative, take some hard quantitative courses, not just statistics 101.

AI lets us perform very powerful quantitative analyses by just feeding it data and asking questions, which is fantastic. But, if you don't understand how AI is conducting that analysis, then the answers are at best worthless and at worst dangerous.