Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So this is happening off the catalog where it publishes back into the catalog?

Brian Rigney: Correct. With Publicator, you start with a PDF and you end up with a richer, more engaging version of that PDF online. It still looks like the printed version.

Sramana Mitra: Where would we find a good example of this. Does Ethan Allen have live examples?

Brian Rigney: It does. Let me find one for you. Go to the Ethan Allen website and you’ll see catalogs at the bottom of the page. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on your work. I’d like to understand the customer base. What is the target customer base? Also, do some use cases of a couple of your interesting customers that well illustrate what you’re doing.

Brian Rigney: We’ve 1,500 brands across the globe. They represent folks like Marks & Spencer and Getty Images in the UK and across North America, we’ve got New York and Company. The customer base for Publicator is very broad. It’s designed for anyone who has a PDF that they want to put online and create a very rich and engaging experience. The Creator, which is the newest one, is very much focused on the retail sector. They have a high need for creating very rich and very engaging experiences to capture their user’s attention, and to make shopping very easy. You can allow someone to shop the look and it doesn’t force the user to shop in the grid. The grid, as you might suspect, consists of those long rows and columns that are sometimes painful to shop in. They’re not inspiring.

Sramana Mitra: How does this work from a retailer system point of view? The retailer is working off a catalog, right? A catalog has all the product descriptions and images. Where does Zmags come in in that work flow? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags (Part 1)

Content and Commerce are trying to integrate, albeit at  a slow pace. The world order is very far still from my 2007 vision: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS). Nonetheless, read on to learn about some very interesting developments in the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Zmags.

Brian Rigney: I’m the CEO of Zmags. I joined Zmags just about two years ago. My background before that has been a series of startups including companies like CashStar that does digital commerce through gift cards and other applications.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a Maine company right?

Brian Rigney: That is a Maine company, yes. You can find them at CashStar.com. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about the business model, both from what you are doing as well as trends in this kind of marketplace business model. How does this work? How much does the seller get? How much do you get?

Philip Rooke: We have a basic charge. Depending on the product, there is a charge for printing and delivering of T-shirts. The seller can add their own commission on top of that to set their own pricing. Sometimes, people add only 50 cents because they’re not really worried about making a profit. We have other people who have used T-shirts as entry to get into an event, and they’ve added $50. They can govern how much they want to add.

Sramana Mitra: Your basic charge is flat or is that variable?

Philip Rooke: It’s flat. There’s no minimum commitment. You don’t have to pay anything upfront. If somebody buys one of your ideas, we print and we then send you the commission. A T-shirt in the US will be about $9 to $10. People very often add $7 to $8 as commission. If somebody >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This is a concept that is not new. We have seen this concept from a variety of different players. We’ve seen generic ones. We’ve seen specific ones in different categories where various jewelry makers, for instance, come together, in a market place. I’d like to hear from you on what trends you observe in these kinds of marketplace businesses?

Philip Rooke: The number one trend that I’ve observed is the global trend. The things that people are interested in are global. Are you familiar with a game called Goat Simulator? It’s a very niche game. The world market is not huge but the goat game has players in over 150 countries. We are the only provider who was able to service that. What we see happening through social media is the expectation of the consumers all over the world to be able to buy anything anywhere. I have seen some of our YouTuber T-shirts being worn in Bangalore. I’ve seen them in Australia. I’ve seen them in Brazil. These are American YouTubers.

Sramana Mitra: Both your merchants and customers are global or the merchants have a concentration and the customers are global? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What volume of e-commerce does she do on this platform?

Philip Rooke: Unfortunately, that’s confidential information but the top people with us are selling tens of thousands of items per year. Many of my top partners make profits in excess of $100,000 because essentially, they don’t have to do the work. We just have to send them their commission payment afterwards.

Sramana Mitra: When you start somebody up, other than providing you with the images, fonts, and texts that goes into the shirt, do they have to do anything else?

Philip Rooke: In the last 12 months, we’ve had 70,000 people coming onto our platform, 69,000 of whom have come to our platform, registered, and put up a shop or put their ideas to sell in our marketplaces. We run marketplaces in various countries and we do the marketing. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt (Part 1)

Philip runs Spreadshirt from Berlin, and discusses the trends in global e-commerce that he observes through his company.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as Spreadshirt.

Philip Rooke: I took over being the CEO of Spreadshirt about five or six years ago. Spreadshirt is an e-commerce platform that allows anybody to take design or content and put it onto merchandise like T-shirts and hoodies. When the idea is ordered, we print it. We deliver it. We handle the e-commerce transaction. Then the creator of the idea, at the end, gets paid a share of the profit. Essentially, we provide e-commerce services for anybody from artists to social media campaigns.

Sramana Mitra: You do both the processing of the transactions as well as the delivery?

Philip Rooke: Yes, we have 150 base products that you can print on. We use high-tech printing processes to create the end result. We handle the stocks and the transactions. Within minutes, you should be able to create ideas and put them to sale even without any e-commerce experience. >>>

Bootstrapping With A Paycheck: Katie Echeverry, CEO of Unique Vintage (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You sell apparel through them or shoes?

Katie Echeverry: Apparel.

Sramana Mitra: That’s awesome actually.

Katie Echeverry: It is. I really knew nothing about wholesale. They were so patient with me with all the terminologies. I remember saying, “What’s EDI?” They were very patient and have taught me a lot. I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher. I was so impressed and touched by the way they treated me when I was the one selling them my line that I actually flew my entire company up to Vegas to tour the Zappos headquarters. They’ve had a very big impact on me.

Sramana Mitra: Can you give me a quick anchor timeframe? For how long did you do this company in this mode of doing the pharmaceutical sales job and bootstrapping the company before you went full-time with it?
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