Hello and welcome to the Retail Podcast.
Jay Topper, who we'll talk to in one second, the Chief Customer
Officer at Fabric. Jay, for those who don't know
Fabric or don't know yourself, if you don't mind just giving us
maybe a career background and then tell us a recap on what
Fabric does. Sure.
And Alex, thank you for having me as well.
I've been super looking forward to this.
I've listened to many of your podcasts, so thank you.
My career. I started out in the United
States military, so I served in our Army and our Coast Guard up
and through about 1997 and then from 1997 to 2024.
I primarily worked for retailers Rosetta Stone, Kroger, FTD, The
Flower Company, and most recently Chico's FAS in a
variety of roles from CIO to CTO to COO to Chief Digital Officer.
Most recently as my last two tours of duty, I put fabric in
when I was at Chico's FAS. I was a super early adopter and
it was a very, it was a partnership because the
heartbeat of the entire suite of products there is is the OMS,
the order management system. And we partnered together to
breathe life into something that would serve a multi billion
dollar multi channel Omni channel retailer that had a lot
of complexities, but that the rest of the market would
embrace. And it was wildly successful.
We were bought by Sycamore Partners.
We went from public to private and I exited the company along
with our other sea levels. I contracted for fabric for two
or three months. I did some blogs and some
content and just I've always fallen in love with the product
from both experience and spending years with them.
And then so now I work as a chief customer officer and in
short, Fabric is an ecommerce platform.
It's a composable headless. It cheques those boxes.
I think what makes it uniquely special from my standpoint is a
few things. Number one is it was, it was
built from the ground up as composable and cloud native and
it's very empowering to the end users.
So in the retail industry, time is super precious.
Margins are sometimes tight. So the faster you can speed up
and the smarter you can speed up the experience of the end users
to then serve in turn serve their customers, the better.
While certainly it has the the checkout and price and promotion
drop ship. And I think the two flagship
products are are the product catalogue and the order
management system, which a lot of people start with and then
and then go on to put the other aspects of the platform in
place. It can be very in a very
incremental approach. So what's keeping everyone awake
right now when you're meeting new or prospective or your
existing customers? What's top of mind right now in
in your world? Yeah, that's a great question.
I think there's a couple things that come to mind.
And again, I I speak from someone who was in the buyer's
chair for 27 years and, and had a lot, have a lot of peers and
friends in the industry. And so I, I left from 1:00 to
the next. And it's that empathy that that
drives me. And I think, I think there's a
few things. One is, it's, it's a bit of an
unknown market right now. And when we head into Q4
especially and with the election and yes, Covid's behind us, but
there's been a little bit of instability even since then with
inflation and all these other macro things, people are are
hunkered down a little bit. And so that leads to really
helping customers understand why, what problem are they
trying to solve and then how because a lot of companies are
are stuck in legacy monoliths or sometimes even composable
platforms that require an incredible amount of technology
to manage. And whatever their situation
might be in it could be anything from TCO to to to Omni channel.
I'm, I'm a, I'm a freak when it comes to what Omni channel
really is and what it really means.
They're trying to get out of some sort of box and, and how
become super complicated. Like how can I replace this big
thing with these little things that add up without putting huge
risk to my business? And I think there's pent up
demand actually. And and people want to be shown
the way I get more involved in how to architect the story to
their executives or their boards or their CEO's, which is what
I've done my entire career. And then lastly, they want
empathetic partners because I'm not a salesperson.
I'm never going to be a salesperson.
I'm 63 and that ship has long sailed.
But I can't empathise with people because I've sat in all
their chairs and I've replaced 100 platforms in my career.
I actually counted them not too long ago.
You have to 1st figure out why and is there actually a problem
to solve and then you have to figure out the how and then you
have to articulate it and, and then it gets to execution, which
is a whole nother can of worms. That's the the most exciting
part to me of a RE platform. So.
In terms of the things that you've mentioned, Omni channel
obviously is one element, cost is another element.
What am I missing in terms of the the the the things that are
top of mind for for your customers right now?
I think Omni channel cost and I think is companies are getting
more myopic on what the they, you know, it's like you know,
you have revenue and EBITDA and then under that you have
conversion traffic and AOV and gross margin and then down below
that the things that feed that. I think the concept of outcome
based technology investments which people have always talked
about, but it's becoming a lot more ingrained.
So I think business performance along along with the cost and
Omni channel are are real keys. They have to see the tie.
There's only so much discretionary spend a company
can make. Infrastructure costs are often
non ROI. So that makes the pool even
smaller. And so every dollar that you
spend there, you want to spend it where you're going to get the
most return. So that outcome based
implementations are, are are are much more, we're much more
focused now on outcomes and metrics than we ever have been
before. I got you and and most of your
customers like is it on site, off site, is it in the cloud or
is it a mix in terms of what that where their infrastructure
sits? It's it's a mix actually, I
think sometimes they're, they're cloud based monoliths.
I there are still a lot of home grown systems out there.
In fact, some, many of the customers I speak to, I think 10
or years ago, I built my own e-commerce platform a couple
companies ago because there really wasn't a micro service
based modular one that was prime time yet.
And, and I think at this point in time it, I don't want to use
the word commodity necessarily, but the e-commerce platform
itself is the way it's getting priced, the way it's getting
implemented has become a little bit more commoditized than it
has been in the past. And I think, I think we're
seeing that. And so I think you're going to
see pricing eventually become a little bit more commoditized and
then it gets down to, all right, what's the difference and how
you're going to impact my end users and my customers.
Yeah. Well, I mean, and let me ask you
the tough question that a lot, you know, obviously again, I'm
sure you've had this question a few times, but you know when I'm
looking at who I'm going to be placing my business with because
you are running the heart of the business, right.
For a lot of commerce, the e-commerce engine is the growth
engine. What do you think makes fabric
special or unique in that sense? Obviously the headless element,
I've got the flexibility, it's composable, but what's your
opinion? What?
What's the thing? Why do you win?
What's the reasons you win? Yeah.
I mean, I and we did win. We, we had remarkable results
putting fabric in end to end and we actually ran it head to head
against the legacy platform over peak at the direction of our
Chief Financial Officer because he wanted proof.
And so during the busiest season, we actually run a split.
And I think there's a couple things.
Number one is it was it it's it was definitely built from a
cloud native composable standpoint.
So there's a lot of companies that are trying to move to micro
services from monolith. I've been there done that.
It is incredibly hard. So it's native.
So you get all the things like active active where there's
where if one goes down immediately, another picks up.
You get the auto scaling over peak.
You don't have to add more servers.
You get all that stuff. I think two things make fabric
unique and why I pick them and why I now work for them.
One is the power to the end user.
So if you're a site merchant and you need to make regular sites,
pricing updates, product updates to your site price, product
promotion presentation, you're dialling those things every day
during peak, sometimes four and five war rooms a day where you
have to make changes. You can't go to development to
ask for changes. You need to have that power at
your fingertips and eventually AI giving you recommendations of
what to do. So you don't have to go run a
report 1st and then come back and then and then move those
dials So you have the the power with the end user.
So that's always top of mind for us because they're serving their
customers. So we not only have to be
empathetic to, to to them, but also to what they're trying to
do for their customers, which we're a step removed from.
And then the second thing is we listen and they listen to me as
a customer. And it's bringing that empathy
to the table where a lot of our customers that are are super
smart and the problems they're trying to solve, sometimes
they're the same problems we're trying to solve.
So there's a lot of Co innovation and Co design that
takes place. So we really harness our
customers well to help advance our product.
We do almost not. The voice of the customer is
very strong inside of our company and companies lose that
over time. And we're still relatively
small. We play big, but we're five
years old and, and, and I'm fiercely protective of keeping
that culture as, as we grow well.
What's in terms of going back to Omni Channel 1 of the things I,
I, I travelling the world and going to these conferences, some
of the executives at retailers, I, I hear them talk about their
frustrations with digital touchpoints expanding and
conversion expanding. Whereas in the past, maybe if
you were lucky, you would get a customer at 7 digital
touchpoints and then they would convert.
So conversion used to happen a lot faster.
And again, this is more of a question than a statement.
I'm just curious, have you seen that too in terms of is
conversion taking longer? And if it is, again, what are
some of the things from your perspective that you could sort
of bake into your e-commerce strategy that could help with
basically converting customers, I presume off the, the, the
plethora of platforms in social and the, the, the, the, the
multitude of digital touch points that exist out there?
Yeah, First I'll just ground, you know of what Omni channel is
to me. And so Omni channel is to me is
it's bringing the promise of the brand and the consistency of
that promise of the brand at every single step in the
process, whether it's physical or digital.
And there's huge opportunities to bring digital into the
physical into the store, amazing things that can happen there and
bringing the the physical to the digital like in clienteling.
And and so from from my standpoint, the it's not so much
there are more touches, but I think the art and the science is
in understanding the impact of one touch to another.
And that can be complex because it's multi touch attribution,
but and a lot of times you have marketing finance and data are
are presenting different ways to measure the effect of marketing
spend because marketing spend is the hugest variable cost above
the line that there is. You can dial it up and down all
day long. So the more accurate you can
understand the impact of that, not just to your site, but
people that are going into the store and people that go to
stores that are then going to the site because the vast
majority of multi channel customers start in the store and
then go online. Second, they don't start online
and go into the store. So figuring out a a model, it
can be simple that can measure that, that all three of those
groups agree on marketing, finance and technology.
So you can start to get a baseline of the impact of those
different channels let's you then invest more smartly in the
ones that are driving the most downstream ramifications.
You know, for example, you know, social may impact e-mail, but
PLA's may be the thing that actually drives more people into
the store or whatever the the formula happens to be.
So you have to measure them and you can't get caught up too far
because the data people will get to in the weeds.
The marketing people want to validate their spend and the
finance people just want to see results.
So if you can come together on a super simple model, then you can
start to, to dial that, that variable marketing a little more
efficiently than in the past. And I think that's absolutely
critical. I'm I'm a big fan of of of
optimising variable marketing. You, you mentioned data in, in
terms of the data teams. Do you have a preference in
which data platforms you work with or play with or are you
agnostic to that? How, how?
How does the platform manage? Yeah.
So I'm a little bit jaded in this regard.
So where I've I've built and bought a lot of things in my
career. I'm not a hands on technologist.
So I'm unemotional about it. Most of the successes I've had a
a lot of the things like when you think about a customer data
platform, building that ourselves what and then layering
tools that are third party tools on top of that was generally
speaking the the smart way to go.
So we, we were, I was for two, the last three, the last three
assignments. I was a big fan of GCP putting
my data in there and then and then layering some other tools
on top of that to help with the segmentation, the audience
building, the, the, the, the MTA analysis, things like that to
help drive it. But there's a lot of products
out there, but you have to be careful because they, they're
also, I mean, all products, they all have their own PNLS.
They're all trying to drive their businesses and getting
what they're doing in line with what you're trying to do.
And being confident that that's going to March down a certain
way over the next two or three years is critical because if
they start to diverge, then you start to lose that power.
And data to me is like the last bastion of what is absolutely
special to an organisation. So where I would buy almost
everything else around that, I like to fiercely protect and own
as much as reasonable as I can of that part of the ecosystem.
What's your? Spidey sense telling you in
terms of the future of E com and where the market is going?
Yeah, I think there's two things and I'll save the obvious one
for a second. So I'm when I think of stores,
this is very anecdotal, but it'll put a highlight on it.
If you think about a website first you come into a website
and you know exactly where a person is on that website.
You know when they went into the cart, you know if they left the
cart, you know how many images they looked at.
You know if they bought. The way the cameras are set up
in stores now, there's no reason why you can't have that same
instantaneous type of reporting in a store.
You know what clothes they went and looked at.
You know when they went in the backroom to try something on.
You know when you're in line, how long they stayed in line,
Did they leave the store without buying?
So bringing that digital mindset into the store where you're
rapidly looking at information and data, moving product around
the store, looking at demographics, they're right
there on, on the camera that you can really start to bring the,
the speed and the, and the quickness of what's going on in
the digital world into the store.
And it works the opposite way as well with clienteling, bringing
the charm of the store into the digital world.
But I, I am a believer and it sounds trite because I'm a, I'm
a cautious believer, but an absolute believer.
And what I mean by that in AI and, and, and I think it's
broader than the sexy things we hear about personalization every
day and things like that. I think there's, I think it's
real. I think it's going to dwarf like
the concept of cloud, you know, was a concept a long time ago.
But I think AI is, is here to stay.
And I think the, the complex part is picking how and where it
fits your business. I think 2 places being
overlooked a little bit or or not as maybe out front in the,
in the, in the realm of the sexy AI is 1 is, is back to the
example I gave is what's happening inside of these
platforms for the employees that when I think about running an
e-commerce site, you know, you, you run a report, you say, hey,
what sold? What was my gross margin on
that? What was my this OK, I see that,
oh, I got too much inventory here.
Let's go back and move these instead of really putting all
this intelligence at the power inside the power of the platform
to enable the ND. Just like you want stores to go
faster, you need digital to go faster because to me, speed is
king. And then you have the back
office, not back office, but in house functions like planning
and allocation, how much product to buy, where to deploy it, what
you should be paying for it, what you should be charging for
it. You know, long before it even
gets in front of the customer, let alone what should I be
designing for the customer In fashion, you get a lot of things
that are are starting to be more and more intelligent to help you
design buying clothing and accessories and what type of
beauty products are next. So I think there's going to be a
lot of trial and error. And I think if you have a super
nimble platform, you can try more things more frequently.
Getting back to what we said, but there's no question that if
you're not spending 20% of your time think as a executive
thinking and, and analysing and even testing and trying, you
know, AI based things that can help move the business of the
problems you're trying to solve. I think you're missing out here.
I, I think this is going to be a wave that is, is rote within the
next, you know, 5 or 10 years or even two to three years in some
cases. 111 question that does come to mind and it's like
inertia, right? People specifically with
platforms such as their e-commerce, they're so scared to
look at re platforming or moving away.
And so therefore they know it sucks, but they sort of like is
it does it suck enough, right? Or is it or is it less sucky
this year than it was that year because everything's tied in a
monolith central mainframe somewhere because it's too big
to to change. What do you say to those
customers that come to you like, you know where they're like
they're Yeah, what do you say? I got to tell you, I, I, I've
done a lot of re platforms and, and usually I, I'm not the guy
they bring in to maintain things.
I'm the guy they bring in when a material transformation is
needed. Every company I've been to,
massive transformations have taken place and I think it's
thrilling. And, and I, I'm not, I'm not
pitching this. I have a ten part blog series I
did on re platforming from end to end that we're going to put
into an e-book here pretty soon. But I think it's thrilling.
I think figuring the problems you're trying to solve, figuring
out the ecosystem and the platforms and the Sis and then
de risking the implementation and having metrics and data as
your sort of foundation. I, I think it's thrilling and,
and there's always risk. And every day you wake up,
what's the biggest risk today? Knock that risk down.
And then you got another bigger risk.
Knock that one down. It's, I don't know, it's what
our job is. I mean, we have to evolve and we
have to evolve quickly in this world.
So to me, I, I, there is a lot because retail still has a lot
of old school in it, a lot of people that are very brick and
mortar focused to this day. And getting that digital first
mentality is it's a thrilling, you know, it's a thrilling
transfer, personal transformation for a human to go
through. And I went through it long ago
at Rosetta Stone and got wrapped around the customer.
And, and the concept of digital and I just think it's thrilling.
So I try to help them, you know, be able to be comfortable that
you can de risk this. It is a if there's art, but it's
a science. You succeed or fail, you know,
based on the prep work you do upfront and then you execute
like crazy, pivot when you need to and you'll get there.
I don't know. It's I do hear it on an awful
lot, though. There is trepidation, but I just
get excited about the whole thing.
I mean, and that's good because that's what people will want,
you know, when they're going through the process.
I've just, I've seen it from both sides and I think it's a
double whammy coming back from China in terms of this post
digital world where they are, everything has transformed.
Everything is E enabled or e-commerce enabled.
I think retailers in Europe and in the US will get a double
whammy of, you know, the competitors can go faster and
their physical stores are not engaging or entertaining and
they can't convert as much as they need to convert.
And so then they're left in, in some of the horror stories that
we, we hear in, in, in the news about retail.
Jay, thank you so much. I, I want to be sensitive to the
time that we agreed for the podcast.
It's been an absolute blast. Are you, are you guys doing any
of the, I know you are NRF, are you doing NRF this year as well?
Or we are, we're doing NRF. We have some special things
planned for NRF. We're doing Shop Talk Chicago.
We could have, I'll be at shop talk.
We could have done it in person. Yeah, that'd be great.
Alex. It was a pleasure.
Thank you for having me. Thanks a lot, Jake.