Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Retail podcast
live at NRS. I'm here with Fabric actually
one of the major sponsors on on the lanyard.
You can see them all around the show, privileged enough to be
joined by Mike Micucci, CEO of Fabric.
Thank you so much Mike for giving up your.
Time pleasure. I'm surprised you've got a voice
because now that you've been talking to your customers.
Well, hey, it's I've been practising.
How about that? So listen, for those who don't
know about Fabric, don't mind doing two things for me, he just
give us a little bit of background about you how you
ended up at Fabric. We're sort of journey here and
then maybe focusing on Fabric. Well, yeah.
Well, first again thank you Alex for the opportunity and it's
been a wonderful NRF here. We we clearly are are being
being present that are at Interop.
I've been the CEO here about five months now.
I'm relatively new to the company.
What attracted me, the company was just the amazing platform
technology and forward-looking vision as the commerce world's
rapidly evolving with the app and things like AI.
Yeah, prior to this I was a long time Salesforce executive and I
was the CEO of Salesforce commerce father for many years.
OK. And it's been an absolute
privilege feedback in the commerce world working on
leading cutting edge technology and helping companies
revolution. So what do you find?
So over the last three days, we're coming up obviously to the
end of the third day. What's been the thing that's
been the top of mind of executives who are coming to see
you? Yes.
Top of mind is how can they drive fast return on their
technology. But you, I mean, companies
globally have poor a tonne of money and the technology because
of coke, right? And there's quite a bit of
hangover on digesting that. So as they look at say, how do
we take those investments but turn those into real world
conversion results and AOV results and basically get a
superior TCO, that's what's top of their mind.
Go ahead, help me get to market really quick and realise results
And if we can do that, this is not a project we're looking.
At, Yeah. And then in terms of customers,
they obviously being new, you must have spent the first you
know whatever just focused on customer, customer meeting your
customers. Yes, what's been an interesting
because obviously you come from Salesforce, what's an
interesting outcome that you were like, oh, you were
surprised by and your customers from their journey of working
with Fabric? Here is where I, and this is
maybe my call this a humble bride, but we came off a holiday
with two things. First of all, 0.
Downtime. Yeah.
And you know, look, holiday is like the Super Bowl, American
term, Super Bowl of the commerce world.
Yeah. And you're all hands on deck.
You've got, you've been preparing for months.
You got everybody there and we went through this seamless.
Y'all. This is the beauty of having a
built a new stack on, you know, all cloud services on the
hyperscalers, in this case Amazon, so that we can scale up.
Yep. Well, we need to and we can
scale down as the demand, you know, as you go post holiday.
Yeah, so 10 issues. That was phenomenal.
That makes me breathe easier, makes my customers breathe
easier. Stability is first and foremost
in customer experience. Number two was just increasing
conversion. We saw our investors on average
at over 20% year over year conversion and I was like wow.
And I asked him a lot about that and there was, it wasn't just
one thing at a combination. One, they had just great
performance. We have lightning fast API
speeds. So that meant that when the
shopping people were shopping on our product, they were seeing
just really good response rates and we know speed helps improve
conversion. It's a flat out industry that
everybody every 30% increase in performance, yeah, you see
almost up to a 10% increase. So just getting speed and
stability, those sound like obvious, but they're the basics,
like who wants to shop on a slow place.
Yeah, right, where you know things are buggy or what others
is getting them a bit back using the back end of our services,
things like inventory availability so that you know
when you get to a product detail page, you can see what inventory
is available, you can reserve that inventory.
If it's a backward situation, you give them offer, you can see
if there's any availability in the region at your physical
store. So now it's not just what's in
your distribution centre, but any of the stores all that
becomes instantly available. Yeah that helped our customers
using best in class services or they didn't even have to swap
out the app or the head. Yeah.
They just stitched in the services that were helping
unlock on incremental going. So those were the things that
really surprised me was I knew we were going to do well.
I didn't expect to do this well. Yeah.
And so NRF here we are talking about through the lens of this
customer success, how we can help our customers on that
journey. This NRF, we announced our new
order management capability. We've built it over the last
year with a handful of key design customers.
Yeah, it was designed to drive omnichannel retail experience,
which is what everybody says. But let me just take a yeah,
yeah, yeah. On COVID.
Yeah. During COVID, where did all the
money go? It went into digital cause
nobody could go anywhere. Yeah, alright, we we're all
we're out of that. You know we're out of that.
We still have issues, but people are back in the source.
Yeah. Where are people investing?
They're investing in the physical, physical experience.
Yeah, but as consumers what do we want?
We still want that kind of flexibility on a digital
experience, but we also want it when we in the store being, hey,
I want to see if inventory is available that my size, our
availability or whatever is not there.
Can I talk to somebody quickly reserve it, can I ship from
store and pick up in store returns?
How? How is that presented in in the
physical store? Are you?
Is it in an app? That Ohh yeah.
How does that represent? Well and.
You can manifest. Those, those latter shopping
experiences are powered by order management system that can
handle the order. Yeah.
Now if you're a store associate, we have a.
We literally have a store app that they can use right to go.
And just like. Yeah, it's like it is in store
app, yeah. And or if you have a clienteling
app, maybe you're using like NAD Mobile or predict Spring, yeah,
we because we are services base ahead in the services.
Space go on you, so you. Just said right into there and
those are great use cases. We want our customers to use the
existing tech investments, yeah, but they want to be powered by
investing class platform. Again back to lightning fast
speed adding new services on Google and that's one of the
reasons why I joined this company was look in my prior
life is really hard to make incremental changes.
Yeah these were these were pretty rigid monolithic
platforms. They're worked well in their in
their swim lane. Yeah.
But the world is changing really quickly and the the founders
built this off the premises white why can't every company
behave from a perspective like Amazon.
These are all Amazon engineers. So Amazon built this web
services, you know, all web services and modern so it can
react super fast price promotion inventory.
Yeah. And that disconnected piece and
it's from merchandising to film it.
Yeah. So let's take those same
principles and bring them to everybody else.
So as you see new needs, you can quickly incorporate those
capabilities into whatever application that might be your
customer service Rep, it might be your in store app, it might
be your physical digital store. That's what's so much fun.
Being able to, you know, are the possible wherever you need to
go. She finds that retailers are
worried about in terms of another system that they have to
integrate. Is that like what's the barrier
then what's the barrier to entry room?
People are are having conversations with you.
What's? Why do they think they can't
use? Fabric.
Yeah. Well, I would say, you know, and
you take a step back and look at the industry as a whole.
Because that's what I'm thinking.
I'm thinking that they've got their ERP, they've got.
There's so many different systems.
Yeah, right. And still when you go and talk
to the customer, like it took me 6 months to integrate to TikTok,
Yeah, right. I'm so frustrated.
All the platforms and I'm guilty of this in my prior life, they
are like come to me and use everything for me and then get
rid of all the other tech. Yeah, OK, so the barrier, a lot
of case is having to switch over from A to B and having the
technical expertise to do that. I mean, this is like a lot of.
Just absolutely So instead. It's like, look, we'll do it
slightly different, use the systems you have them, let's
just make them go faster and better and use the underlying
capabilities. And with the modern tech today,
it's pretty easy to have with all the simple endpoints that
you can incorporate in. So that removes some of those
barriers to adoption. The second thing is this is
really I think the commerce platform for guilty of this is
essentially dead. Hey, here's my API's.
You go tape, figure it out. You know, we're about customer
success. We're about driving conversion,
helping you increase average order.
So we built these end to end, meaning let's go all the way
from the experience, Yeah, help you with your business logic all
the way down to the underlying service.
So you can go a lot faster versus, hey, you got a great
platform, lots of APIs, I'm sure you're pretty smart.
Go take those APIs and figure it out later.
Yeah, that's not fabric fabric. We're about customer success
helping you drive outcomes because in today's world every
investment dollar counts has to count for those urgent that our
average order value and really stunning custom.
Well, I mean look listen for me the future of retail in the
sense and some of the themes that I've picked on is, is the
fact that inspiration and discovery are now becoming
growth engines. But then the systems to support
Inspiration and Discovery and store are not there because you
know the the consumers left to their own.
Final two questions and I appreciate you busy day,
something that's inspired you at the show and what, what, what
point of inspiration are you going to take away?
And then in terms of fabric, when you as CEO looking to the
the future, what what do you see in terms of the future?
What are the areas that are really interesting?
Yeah, well those questions actually are multi part
question. Actually, I'm gonna kind of
blend together, OK? Right.
We are on the cusp of the biggest technology revenues
through AI. Yeah, OK.
And commerce, there's so many use cases in commerce that have
been in the heads of all of these amazing brands and
retailers companies globally, but they've just been too hard
to do. Yeah, And it's either takes too
much labour, I've touched too many systems together and so
forth. AI is going to be the biggest
unlock for the consumer experience, right?
It's gonna touch every app aspect from customer success all
the way through to the shopping. Yeah, but you can't do that
without the back end being rock solid.
Because every commerce experience, I don't care where
it comes from, from some combination of product, price,
promo, inventory and order. Yeah.
And if you can do that and mix and match.com, well, yeah.
So what inspires me? The things that I see from the
hyperscalers around the advancements.
Agnostic or you? We are, we are, we are built on
a WS, yeah. But we use, we can use services
from other people as needed quickly investor breed a right.
So it's not. Yeah.
So my what gets me excited is seeing these innovations where
AI can build consumer experiences or shopping
experiences or BBC at any, just whatever you dream of.
Yeah, that is unbelievable. And the advancements you're
going to see in search and those are going to unlock the next
kind of wave of I think of shopping and whether it's BBC.
And that's what gets me excited because as a platform provider
and ready to help a lot because you can't unlock them unless you
can deliver those combinations, that critical kind of a comic
level. So that's what inspires me.
Yeah. And in delivering kind of real
results versus kind of Fantom, like, yeah, that's a great
project. In 18 months, we'll see how it
goes. Listen I I totally agree with
everything you said and it's really refreshing and nice to
hear about the enablement or empower of conversion in store
right. Because I think it's just the
system challenge in store is is is big and and and I think if
you're lucky enough that you were a pureplay online and
you've gone into physical and you're building everything from
the ground up, whoa, very lucky. But that's not the reality of
modern return. And you and I has consumers work
were frustrated like I think there's a better way.
Yeah, And I think the technology, and This is why I
love being a fabric and here to help revolutionise commerce for
everyone and let's go. Yeah, Mike, thank you, So.
Much Hey, so much fun. Thanks for the invite today.