1 00:00:00,190 --> 00:00:03,920 Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Retail podcast 2 00:00:03,930 --> 00:00:07,130 live at NRS. I'm here with Fabric actually 3 00:00:07,140 --> 00:00:09,640 one of the major sponsors on on the lanyard. 4 00:00:09,650 --> 00:00:13,010 You can see them all around the show, privileged enough to be 5 00:00:13,020 --> 00:00:16,020 joined by Mike Micucci, CEO of Fabric. 6 00:00:16,210 --> 00:00:17,960 Thank you so much Mike for giving up your. 7 00:00:17,970 --> 00:00:19,900 Time pleasure. I'm surprised you've got a voice 8 00:00:19,910 --> 00:00:23,610 because now that you've been talking to your customers. 9 00:00:23,620 --> 00:00:25,860 Well, hey, it's I've been practising. 10 00:00:25,870 --> 00:00:28,610 How about that? So listen, for those who don't 11 00:00:28,620 --> 00:00:32,910 know about Fabric, don't mind doing two things for me, he just 12 00:00:32,920 --> 00:00:35,080 give us a little bit of background about you how you 13 00:00:35,090 --> 00:00:37,630 ended up at Fabric. We're sort of journey here and 14 00:00:37,640 --> 00:00:39,910 then maybe focusing on Fabric. Well, yeah. 15 00:00:39,980 --> 00:00:42,950 Well, first again thank you Alex for the opportunity and it's 16 00:00:42,960 --> 00:00:46,570 been a wonderful NRF here. We we clearly are are being 17 00:00:46,580 --> 00:00:49,110 being present that are at Interop. 18 00:00:49,800 --> 00:00:52,530 I've been the CEO here about five months now. 19 00:00:53,200 --> 00:00:55,290 I'm relatively new to the company. 20 00:00:55,580 --> 00:00:59,510 What attracted me, the company was just the amazing platform 21 00:00:59,520 --> 00:01:03,360 technology and forward-looking vision as the commerce world's 22 00:01:03,370 --> 00:01:06,300 rapidly evolving with the app and things like AI. 23 00:01:06,390 --> 00:01:10,400 Yeah, prior to this I was a long time Salesforce executive and I 24 00:01:10,410 --> 00:01:14,040 was the CEO of Salesforce commerce father for many years. 25 00:01:14,090 --> 00:01:16,800 OK. And it's been an absolute 26 00:01:16,810 --> 00:01:20,880 privilege feedback in the commerce world working on 27 00:01:20,890 --> 00:01:23,400 leading cutting edge technology and helping companies 28 00:01:23,410 --> 00:01:25,830 revolution. So what do you find? 29 00:01:25,840 --> 00:01:29,160 So over the last three days, we're coming up obviously to the 30 00:01:29,170 --> 00:01:31,620 end of the third day. What's been the thing that's 31 00:01:31,630 --> 00:01:35,560 been the top of mind of executives who are coming to see 32 00:01:35,570 --> 00:01:36,390 you? Yes. 33 00:01:36,440 --> 00:01:41,690 Top of mind is how can they drive fast return on their 34 00:01:41,700 --> 00:01:44,710 technology. But you, I mean, companies 35 00:01:44,720 --> 00:01:48,310 globally have poor a tonne of money and the technology because 36 00:01:48,320 --> 00:01:50,770 of coke, right? And there's quite a bit of 37 00:01:50,780 --> 00:01:55,330 hangover on digesting that. So as they look at say, how do 38 00:01:55,340 --> 00:01:58,690 we take those investments but turn those into real world 39 00:01:58,700 --> 00:02:01,910 conversion results and AOV results and basically get a 40 00:02:01,920 --> 00:02:04,690 superior TCO, that's what's top of their mind. 41 00:02:04,740 --> 00:02:08,800 Go ahead, help me get to market really quick and realise results 42 00:02:08,810 --> 00:02:11,850 And if we can do that, this is not a project we're looking. 43 00:02:11,860 --> 00:02:14,880 At, Yeah. And then in terms of customers, 44 00:02:14,950 --> 00:02:18,660 they obviously being new, you must have spent the first you 45 00:02:18,670 --> 00:02:21,760 know whatever just focused on customer, customer meeting your 46 00:02:21,770 --> 00:02:23,860 customers. Yes, what's been an interesting 47 00:02:23,870 --> 00:02:25,680 because obviously you come from Salesforce, what's an 48 00:02:25,690 --> 00:02:28,930 interesting outcome that you were like, oh, you were 49 00:02:28,940 --> 00:02:32,200 surprised by and your customers from their journey of working 50 00:02:32,210 --> 00:02:35,720 with Fabric? Here is where I, and this is 51 00:02:35,770 --> 00:02:39,310 maybe my call this a humble bride, but we came off a holiday 52 00:02:39,320 --> 00:02:43,290 with two things. First of all, 0. 53 00:02:43,300 --> 00:02:44,490 Downtime. Yeah. 54 00:02:44,550 --> 00:02:47,810 And you know, look, holiday is like the Super Bowl, American 55 00:02:47,820 --> 00:02:50,430 term, Super Bowl of the commerce world. 56 00:02:50,440 --> 00:02:52,130 Yeah. And you're all hands on deck. 57 00:02:52,140 --> 00:02:54,020 You've got, you've been preparing for months. 58 00:02:54,030 --> 00:02:57,310 You got everybody there and we went through this seamless. 59 00:02:57,660 --> 00:03:00,490 Y'all. This is the beauty of having a 60 00:03:00,500 --> 00:03:05,500 built a new stack on, you know, all cloud services on the 61 00:03:05,510 --> 00:03:08,910 hyperscalers, in this case Amazon, so that we can scale up. 62 00:03:08,920 --> 00:03:10,430 Yep. Well, we need to and we can 63 00:03:10,440 --> 00:03:14,800 scale down as the demand, you know, as you go post holiday. 64 00:03:14,850 --> 00:03:17,980 Yeah, so 10 issues. That was phenomenal. 65 00:03:18,050 --> 00:03:20,890 That makes me breathe easier, makes my customers breathe 66 00:03:20,900 --> 00:03:23,260 easier. Stability is first and foremost 67 00:03:23,270 --> 00:03:26,960 in customer experience. Number two was just increasing 68 00:03:26,970 --> 00:03:30,160 conversion. We saw our investors on average 69 00:03:30,170 --> 00:03:34,220 at over 20% year over year conversion and I was like wow. 70 00:03:34,230 --> 00:03:36,920 And I asked him a lot about that and there was, it wasn't just 71 00:03:36,930 --> 00:03:43,070 one thing at a combination. One, they had just great 72 00:03:43,080 --> 00:03:45,630 performance. We have lightning fast API 73 00:03:45,640 --> 00:03:47,790 speeds. So that meant that when the 74 00:03:47,800 --> 00:03:52,030 shopping people were shopping on our product, they were seeing 75 00:03:52,660 --> 00:03:57,530 just really good response rates and we know speed helps improve 76 00:03:57,540 --> 00:04:00,970 conversion. It's a flat out industry that 77 00:04:00,980 --> 00:04:05,470 everybody every 30% increase in performance, yeah, you see 78 00:04:05,480 --> 00:04:10,030 almost up to a 10% increase. So just getting speed and 79 00:04:10,040 --> 00:04:12,960 stability, those sound like obvious, but they're the basics, 80 00:04:12,970 --> 00:04:14,970 like who wants to shop on a slow place. 81 00:04:14,980 --> 00:04:18,240 Yeah, right, where you know things are buggy or what others 82 00:04:18,250 --> 00:04:21,820 is getting them a bit back using the back end of our services, 83 00:04:21,829 --> 00:04:24,830 things like inventory availability so that you know 84 00:04:24,840 --> 00:04:28,240 when you get to a product detail page, you can see what inventory 85 00:04:28,250 --> 00:04:30,240 is available, you can reserve that inventory. 86 00:04:30,250 --> 00:04:33,480 If it's a backward situation, you give them offer, you can see 87 00:04:33,490 --> 00:04:36,960 if there's any availability in the region at your physical 88 00:04:36,970 --> 00:04:39,050 store. So now it's not just what's in 89 00:04:39,060 --> 00:04:41,910 your distribution centre, but any of the stores all that 90 00:04:41,920 --> 00:04:45,490 becomes instantly available. Yeah that helped our customers 91 00:04:45,560 --> 00:04:49,090 using best in class services or they didn't even have to swap 92 00:04:49,100 --> 00:04:51,240 out the app or the head. Yeah. 93 00:04:51,250 --> 00:04:54,430 They just stitched in the services that were helping 94 00:04:54,480 --> 00:04:58,760 unlock on incremental going. So those were the things that 95 00:04:58,770 --> 00:05:03,120 really surprised me was I knew we were going to do well. 96 00:05:03,130 --> 00:05:05,360 I didn't expect to do this well. Yeah. 97 00:05:05,430 --> 00:05:10,320 And so NRF here we are talking about through the lens of this 98 00:05:10,330 --> 00:05:13,160 customer success, how we can help our customers on that 99 00:05:13,170 --> 00:05:15,800 journey. This NRF, we announced our new 100 00:05:15,810 --> 00:05:18,480 order management capability. We've built it over the last 101 00:05:18,490 --> 00:05:21,140 year with a handful of key design customers. 102 00:05:21,150 --> 00:05:25,140 Yeah, it was designed to drive omnichannel retail experience, 103 00:05:25,150 --> 00:05:28,070 which is what everybody says. But let me just take a yeah, 104 00:05:28,080 --> 00:05:29,140 yeah, yeah. On COVID. 105 00:05:29,210 --> 00:05:31,420 Yeah. During COVID, where did all the 106 00:05:31,430 --> 00:05:33,110 money go? It went into digital cause 107 00:05:33,120 --> 00:05:35,740 nobody could go anywhere. Yeah, alright, we we're all 108 00:05:35,750 --> 00:05:38,540 we're out of that. You know we're out of that. 109 00:05:38,550 --> 00:05:41,480 We still have issues, but people are back in the source. 110 00:05:41,490 --> 00:05:43,020 Yeah. Where are people investing? 111 00:05:43,030 --> 00:05:45,670 They're investing in the physical, physical experience. 112 00:05:45,680 --> 00:05:48,830 Yeah, but as consumers what do we want? 113 00:05:48,840 --> 00:05:52,160 We still want that kind of flexibility on a digital 114 00:05:52,170 --> 00:05:55,660 experience, but we also want it when we in the store being, hey, 115 00:05:55,670 --> 00:05:58,600 I want to see if inventory is available that my size, our 116 00:05:58,610 --> 00:06:00,430 availability or whatever is not there. 117 00:06:00,480 --> 00:06:02,980 Can I talk to somebody quickly reserve it, can I ship from 118 00:06:02,990 --> 00:06:04,610 store and pick up in store returns? 119 00:06:04,620 --> 00:06:06,750 How? How is that presented in in the 120 00:06:06,760 --> 00:06:08,470 physical store? Are you? 121 00:06:08,520 --> 00:06:10,410 Is it in an app? That Ohh yeah. 122 00:06:10,420 --> 00:06:12,530 How does that represent? Well and. 123 00:06:12,540 --> 00:06:15,080 You can manifest. Those, those latter shopping 124 00:06:15,090 --> 00:06:18,290 experiences are powered by order management system that can 125 00:06:18,300 --> 00:06:19,530 handle the order. Yeah. 126 00:06:19,540 --> 00:06:21,470 Now if you're a store associate, we have a. 127 00:06:21,580 --> 00:06:25,750 We literally have a store app that they can use right to go. 128 00:06:25,760 --> 00:06:29,180 And just like. Yeah, it's like it is in store 129 00:06:29,190 --> 00:06:31,800 app, yeah. And or if you have a clienteling 130 00:06:31,810 --> 00:06:35,120 app, maybe you're using like NAD Mobile or predict Spring, yeah, 131 00:06:35,130 --> 00:06:38,500 we because we are services base ahead in the services. 132 00:06:38,510 --> 00:06:41,080 Space go on you, so you. Just said right into there and 133 00:06:41,120 --> 00:06:44,600 those are great use cases. We want our customers to use the 134 00:06:44,610 --> 00:06:48,220 existing tech investments, yeah, but they want to be powered by 135 00:06:48,230 --> 00:06:51,180 investing class platform. Again back to lightning fast 136 00:06:51,190 --> 00:06:55,360 speed adding new services on Google and that's one of the 137 00:06:55,370 --> 00:07:00,650 reasons why I joined this company was look in my prior 138 00:07:00,660 --> 00:07:04,410 life is really hard to make incremental changes. 139 00:07:04,500 --> 00:07:07,390 Yeah these were these were pretty rigid monolithic 140 00:07:07,400 --> 00:07:09,110 platforms. They're worked well in their in 141 00:07:09,120 --> 00:07:10,590 their swim lane. Yeah. 142 00:07:10,640 --> 00:07:14,710 But the world is changing really quickly and the the founders 143 00:07:14,720 --> 00:07:17,720 built this off the premises white why can't every company 144 00:07:17,730 --> 00:07:19,970 behave from a perspective like Amazon. 145 00:07:20,060 --> 00:07:24,090 These are all Amazon engineers. So Amazon built this web 146 00:07:24,100 --> 00:07:27,610 services, you know, all web services and modern so it can 147 00:07:27,620 --> 00:07:30,080 react super fast price promotion inventory. 148 00:07:30,090 --> 00:07:31,780 Yeah. And that disconnected piece and 149 00:07:31,790 --> 00:07:33,760 it's from merchandising to film it. 150 00:07:33,830 --> 00:07:35,640 Yeah. So let's take those same 151 00:07:35,650 --> 00:07:38,440 principles and bring them to everybody else. 152 00:07:38,490 --> 00:07:41,940 So as you see new needs, you can quickly incorporate those 153 00:07:41,950 --> 00:07:45,070 capabilities into whatever application that might be your 154 00:07:45,080 --> 00:07:48,590 customer service Rep, it might be your in store app, it might 155 00:07:48,600 --> 00:07:51,900 be your physical digital store. That's what's so much fun. 156 00:07:52,110 --> 00:07:55,260 Being able to, you know, are the possible wherever you need to 157 00:07:55,270 --> 00:07:57,010 go. She finds that retailers are 158 00:07:57,020 --> 00:07:59,860 worried about in terms of another system that they have to 159 00:07:59,870 --> 00:08:02,040 integrate. Is that like what's the barrier 160 00:08:02,050 --> 00:08:03,330 then what's the barrier to entry room? 161 00:08:03,340 --> 00:08:05,300 People are are having conversations with you. 162 00:08:05,310 --> 00:08:07,440 What's? Why do they think they can't 163 00:08:07,450 --> 00:08:07,980 use? Fabric. 164 00:08:07,990 --> 00:08:10,930 Yeah. Well, I would say, you know, and 165 00:08:10,940 --> 00:08:13,500 you take a step back and look at the industry as a whole. 166 00:08:13,690 --> 00:08:14,650 Because that's what I'm thinking. 167 00:08:14,660 --> 00:08:17,110 I'm thinking that they've got their ERP, they've got. 168 00:08:17,120 --> 00:08:18,850 There's so many different systems. 169 00:08:18,860 --> 00:08:21,380 Yeah, right. And still when you go and talk 170 00:08:21,390 --> 00:08:24,560 to the customer, like it took me 6 months to integrate to TikTok, 171 00:08:24,570 --> 00:08:26,170 Yeah, right. I'm so frustrated. 172 00:08:27,170 --> 00:08:31,440 All the platforms and I'm guilty of this in my prior life, they 173 00:08:31,450 --> 00:08:35,770 are like come to me and use everything for me and then get 174 00:08:35,780 --> 00:08:39,600 rid of all the other tech. Yeah, OK, so the barrier, a lot 175 00:08:39,610 --> 00:08:43,140 of case is having to switch over from A to B and having the 176 00:08:43,150 --> 00:08:47,000 technical expertise to do that. I mean, this is like a lot of. 177 00:08:47,010 --> 00:08:51,070 Just absolutely So instead. It's like, look, we'll do it 178 00:08:51,080 --> 00:08:54,870 slightly different, use the systems you have them, let's 179 00:08:54,880 --> 00:08:58,380 just make them go faster and better and use the underlying 180 00:08:58,390 --> 00:09:02,080 capabilities. And with the modern tech today, 181 00:09:02,140 --> 00:09:05,310 it's pretty easy to have with all the simple endpoints that 182 00:09:05,320 --> 00:09:09,540 you can incorporate in. So that removes some of those 183 00:09:09,550 --> 00:09:12,820 barriers to adoption. The second thing is this is 184 00:09:12,830 --> 00:09:15,940 really I think the commerce platform for guilty of this is 185 00:09:15,950 --> 00:09:18,350 essentially dead. Hey, here's my API's. 186 00:09:18,360 --> 00:09:22,540 You go tape, figure it out. You know, we're about customer 187 00:09:22,550 --> 00:09:24,780 success. We're about driving conversion, 188 00:09:24,790 --> 00:09:26,190 helping you increase average order. 189 00:09:26,860 --> 00:09:30,410 So we built these end to end, meaning let's go all the way 190 00:09:30,420 --> 00:09:34,410 from the experience, Yeah, help you with your business logic all 191 00:09:34,420 --> 00:09:36,040 the way down to the underlying service. 192 00:09:36,050 --> 00:09:39,390 So you can go a lot faster versus, hey, you got a great 193 00:09:39,400 --> 00:09:42,280 platform, lots of APIs, I'm sure you're pretty smart. 194 00:09:42,290 --> 00:09:44,670 Go take those APIs and figure it out later. 195 00:09:44,740 --> 00:09:48,270 Yeah, that's not fabric fabric. We're about customer success 196 00:09:48,380 --> 00:09:52,010 helping you drive outcomes because in today's world every 197 00:09:52,020 --> 00:09:56,190 investment dollar counts has to count for those urgent that our 198 00:09:56,200 --> 00:09:58,690 average order value and really stunning custom. 199 00:09:59,790 --> 00:10:02,680 Well, I mean look listen for me the future of retail in the 200 00:10:02,690 --> 00:10:05,460 sense and some of the themes that I've picked on is, is the 201 00:10:05,470 --> 00:10:09,660 fact that inspiration and discovery are now becoming 202 00:10:09,670 --> 00:10:12,520 growth engines. But then the systems to support 203 00:10:12,580 --> 00:10:15,840 Inspiration and Discovery and store are not there because you 204 00:10:15,850 --> 00:10:17,760 know the the consumers left to their own. 205 00:10:18,330 --> 00:10:22,030 Final two questions and I appreciate you busy day, 206 00:10:22,040 --> 00:10:26,340 something that's inspired you at the show and what, what, what 207 00:10:26,350 --> 00:10:28,140 point of inspiration are you going to take away? 208 00:10:28,200 --> 00:10:31,710 And then in terms of fabric, when you as CEO looking to the 209 00:10:31,770 --> 00:10:34,950 the future, what what do you see in terms of the future? 210 00:10:34,960 --> 00:10:36,770 What are the areas that are really interesting? 211 00:10:36,840 --> 00:10:40,210 Yeah, well those questions actually are multi part 212 00:10:40,220 --> 00:10:41,450 question. Actually, I'm gonna kind of 213 00:10:41,460 --> 00:10:43,150 blend together, OK? Right. 214 00:10:44,640 --> 00:10:48,390 We are on the cusp of the biggest technology revenues 215 00:10:49,310 --> 00:10:51,080 through AI. Yeah, OK. 216 00:10:51,170 --> 00:10:55,920 And commerce, there's so many use cases in commerce that have 217 00:10:55,930 --> 00:11:00,980 been in the heads of all of these amazing brands and 218 00:11:00,990 --> 00:11:04,360 retailers companies globally, but they've just been too hard 219 00:11:04,370 --> 00:11:06,560 to do. Yeah, And it's either takes too 220 00:11:06,570 --> 00:11:09,530 much labour, I've touched too many systems together and so 221 00:11:09,540 --> 00:11:12,050 forth. AI is going to be the biggest 222 00:11:12,110 --> 00:11:16,670 unlock for the consumer experience, right? 223 00:11:16,680 --> 00:11:20,420 It's gonna touch every app aspect from customer success all 224 00:11:20,430 --> 00:11:24,610 the way through to the shopping. Yeah, but you can't do that 225 00:11:24,620 --> 00:11:27,690 without the back end being rock solid. 226 00:11:27,700 --> 00:11:30,410 Because every commerce experience, I don't care where 227 00:11:30,420 --> 00:11:34,210 it comes from, from some combination of product, price, 228 00:11:34,220 --> 00:11:36,430 promo, inventory and order. Yeah. 229 00:11:36,440 --> 00:11:40,030 And if you can do that and mix and match.com, well, yeah. 230 00:11:40,040 --> 00:11:42,990 So what inspires me? The things that I see from the 231 00:11:43,000 --> 00:11:45,570 hyperscalers around the advancements. 232 00:11:46,510 --> 00:11:50,180 Agnostic or you? We are, we are, we are built on 233 00:11:50,190 --> 00:11:53,710 a WS, yeah. But we use, we can use services 234 00:11:53,720 --> 00:11:57,900 from other people as needed quickly investor breed a right. 235 00:11:57,910 --> 00:12:00,500 So it's not. Yeah. 236 00:12:00,510 --> 00:12:04,690 So my what gets me excited is seeing these innovations where 237 00:12:04,760 --> 00:12:07,880 AI can build consumer experiences or shopping 238 00:12:07,890 --> 00:12:12,420 experiences or BBC at any, just whatever you dream of. 239 00:12:12,490 --> 00:12:16,100 Yeah, that is unbelievable. And the advancements you're 240 00:12:16,110 --> 00:12:19,620 going to see in search and those are going to unlock the next 241 00:12:19,630 --> 00:12:25,520 kind of wave of I think of shopping and whether it's BBC. 242 00:12:26,090 --> 00:12:30,000 And that's what gets me excited because as a platform provider 243 00:12:30,300 --> 00:12:33,890 and ready to help a lot because you can't unlock them unless you 244 00:12:33,900 --> 00:12:37,260 can deliver those combinations, that critical kind of a comic 245 00:12:37,270 --> 00:12:39,800 level. So that's what inspires me. 246 00:12:39,810 --> 00:12:42,290 Yeah. And in delivering kind of real 247 00:12:42,300 --> 00:12:45,130 results versus kind of Fantom, like, yeah, that's a great 248 00:12:45,140 --> 00:12:46,860 project. In 18 months, we'll see how it 249 00:12:46,870 --> 00:12:49,000 goes. Listen I I totally agree with 250 00:12:49,010 --> 00:12:51,970 everything you said and it's really refreshing and nice to 251 00:12:51,980 --> 00:12:56,350 hear about the enablement or empower of conversion in store 252 00:12:56,360 --> 00:12:59,830 right. Because I think it's just the 253 00:12:59,840 --> 00:13:04,870 system challenge in store is is is big and and and I think if 254 00:13:04,880 --> 00:13:07,960 you're lucky enough that you were a pureplay online and 255 00:13:07,970 --> 00:13:10,880 you've gone into physical and you're building everything from 256 00:13:10,890 --> 00:13:14,280 the ground up, whoa, very lucky. But that's not the reality of 257 00:13:14,290 --> 00:13:17,230 modern return. And you and I has consumers work 258 00:13:17,240 --> 00:13:20,080 were frustrated like I think there's a better way. 259 00:13:20,150 --> 00:13:22,540 Yeah, And I think the technology, and This is why I 260 00:13:22,550 --> 00:13:25,920 love being a fabric and here to help revolutionise commerce for 261 00:13:25,930 --> 00:13:29,420 everyone and let's go. Yeah, Mike, thank you, So. 262 00:13:29,430 --> 00:13:31,640 Much Hey, so much fun. Thanks for the invite today.