Future of eCommerce with Curtis Schrum, Head of Strategy at Shero
Introduction to Curtis Schrum, Head of Strategy at Shero
Tim Bucciarelli:
Welcome back to Shaping eCommerce with IronPlane. I’m Tim Bucciarelli, the Director of Engagement at IronPlane. We are today continuing our series on the future of eCommerce.
I’m here today talking with Curtis Schrum, who works with Shero Commerce, also in the eCommerce industry, also developing websites for merchants, and today’s topic is the future of eCommerce.
So, Curtis, thank you very much for joining us today. I appreciate your time. If you could just give everyone a brief intro of your background and your role at Shero Commerce, that would be great.
Curtis Schrum:
Sure. Absolutely, Tim. Thanks for having me. So, my name is Curtis Schrum, as Tim mentioned. I am the Head of Strategy Operations at Shero Commerce, which essentially means that I am responsible for playing the global game of chess of how we strategize to come up with ways to accomplish the goals directed by the company.
And what Shero Commerce actually does is we’re a digital transformation agency, so we do everything from digital marketing, brand initiatives, design initiatives, eCommerce implementations across a variety of platforms, and we basically work with partners and clients to get them to the next step of their evolution in the global world.
Interview with Curtis Schrum
Tim Bucciarelli:
Awesome. Great, thank you. And, as I mentioned to you earlier, Curtis, my introduction to Shero was when I was a merchant, and I went through an RFP process, and Shero was one of the respondents. I had a very good experience working with Beth and the rest of the team there in that process. So, shoutout to Beth and the whole team at Shero.
So, today, like I said, we’re talking about the future of eCommerce, and the first question is a pretty broad question – just getting your perspective on where you think eCommerce will be in five to ten years.
Curtis Schrum:
Sure, absolutely. You know, it’s an interesting question because in five years, I honestly don’t think it’s going to be that different than it is today. If we were to look back five years, things are relatively the same – a lot of the same names, a lot of the same players, a lot of the same technology – it’s just that things are more mature.
I think we’re probably going to see things much the same within the five years, but I do think there’s going to be a little bit of a contraction. We saw a huge expansion in the eCommerce world thanks to Covid and a lot of other factors, but people are wanting to go outside now. So, I think we’re going to see a little bit of a contraction over the next five years.
Now, I think near the end of that five-year window, we’re going to see a bigger push towards, you know, what we call the MACH approach, which I’m sure we’ll touch on later. But, you know, microservices-based, API first, cloud, data, SaaS, headless.
Now, in ten years, I think things are going to look very different than they do today. I think we’re going to see much more of a push from brands to have an eCommerce space, but I think we’re going to see brands moving more to having a type of organic storytelling where their clients – where they’re going to focus on a tactile feel, and how they can reproduce that in-store experience of actually looking through their store and how to do shopping that way as much as they can because we’re already getting questions about that now.
You know, there’s a lot of pushes in both directions – both to make the brick and mortar experience more seamless, so the ability to do a type of AR, augmented reality, type of shopping experience where maybe you can purchase things as you’re going through the store or maybe not even need to put things in a cart and just kind of order as you’re going through the store and checking things out and they’re ready for you when you leave.
And then from the eCommerce side of things, the ability to use fully three-dimensional video to actually get to look at products and what they really look like, and notes for people both that have disabilities and those that don’t know what something actually feels like or things like that. I think we’re going to see a big push in those directions because there very much is a feeling these days when you go into a store, or at least for a lot of our clients and customers, where when we go shopping, there’s a frustration there of like “I looked it up online, but it’s not on the shelf, and it says it is” and it’s a very frustrating experience.
That comes from a space of ordering stuff online all the time where like, “I picked out the things online that I want, and they arrived at my door.”
Tim Bucciarelli:
Exactly. Yeah. And just when I think about ease of shopping also, I think about the voice interaction with your Alexa or with your Google Home and your – maybe that’s 15 years out, you know, it’s beyond – but I think that that’s an element that’s going to be playing more of a role over time.
I think the integrations are going to have to become more seamless. I think people are recognizing that thousands and thousands of technology elements that they can involve in their tech stack – it’s getting to be too much. I think yes, there’s going to be a consolidation in the industry, which is great I think, but it’s also going to have to have – those links between the platforms are going to have to be more standardized and more efficient for people to be able to use them.
And I think that the platforms that make themselves more compatible sooner, I think, are going to have a leg up because the integration between these systems is becoming so critical, especially if we are talking about the difference between monolith and composable, and we will get to that.
Curtis Schrum:
I’m sure we will.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Alright. So let’s talk about specific platforms.
Curtis Schrum:
Yeah, definitely. So, you know, it’s hard not to talk about the big three in the room. It’s probably easier to start with Shopify, of all of them, because it’s one of the biggest players on the board and when you talk about going online these days Shopify’s kind of ubiquitous – like it’s one of the first things that comes to people’s minds.
I think Shopify is great for a lot of industries. When I’m talking to clients or I’m talking to customers or I’m talking to merchants, and they don’t know what platform they want and they ask me about Shopify, I always them if you’re a D2C customer who’s never been online before, you don’t have the robust tools, or maybe you don’t even know how to do digital marketing. Shopify offers a really robust solution for customers like that.
I’m not saying that large brands can’t do well on Shopify; there are plenty that do. But, they have to be very intentional about it because Shopify was never built with big giant brands in mind. It evolved to serve those brands. And Shopify has a lot of opinions about software you can use, integrations you can use, and also products that you can sell on their platform, and there’s nothing wrong with that, you know, to have those opinions.
But not everybody fits into those molds, and that’s where we lead into the second one that I always end up talking about, which is BigCommerce. It’s an up-and-comer – honestly, it’s bigger than people think it is. They’re having really a market year, for them, compared to the other platforms on the list. And really, it’s two words to sum up why – and those are open SaaS.
The idea they are pushing at BigCommerce is that they don’t want to make the decisions for their clients – they want their clients and their customers to make the decisions for themselves, and they just want to give them the toolbox to do that with. BigCommerce does that really well. I’ve seen B2B and B2C customers do very well on them.
They even have specialized product offerings for B2B and B2C customers, and that’s an interesting marketplace. I mean, several firearm manufacturers are on BigCommerce, like CNMG – they operate on BigCommerce. So there’s a big offering there.
And then there’s the third option, which arguably is not in any way a SaaS platform, which is Adobe Commerce. Now, Adobe does a lot of things really well, and then they purchased Magento four years ago, five years ago now, they made a lot of ideas happen very quickly.
And now it feels like they’re kind of shoring things up with it like, you know, a lot of people are getting clicks and views these days talking about the death of Adobe Commerce. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. It drives a huge part of the market, and there are customers that need to be on Adobe Commerce – large companies with very custom product sets, such as fundraising companies, or a chemical company – people who are going to need that type of finite tight control over how their products work with very large scale integrations, maybe with a home-baked ERP system, or medical companies do very well on Magento because they can keep all that in house and control HIPAA.
So, those are the companies that do really well on Adobe Commerce. Really, there are only two other big ones in the pool, and those are Commercetools, which is one of the only big names that offer that headless approach first, an ability to get that type of offering out there – in reality, it competes with BigCommerce and SaaS pretty effectively. It doesn’t compete with Adobe Commerce as much. I will say pricing out at Commercetools is a little wonky because it’s usually pretty custom.
And then there’s Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which I don’t actually do a ton of development on – I do have quite a bit of experience with it. I will say that the customers that I see do very well on Salesforce Commerce Cloud had to do it already because of other things they have going on, or their solution to eCommerce is to throw money at the problem to make the problem go away. Both of those are great options – great reasons to use Salesforce.
And the only other one I would mention would be Open Commerce, which is currently owned by Mailchimp. It is a direct counter-offering to Commercetools. It’s built on Ext JS, it can be hosted through Vercel – but the only downside for it is it’s one step above doing a bespoke implementation. You’ve got to build a lot of stuff yourself; it just gives you a really great framework with a lot of your eCommerce offering solved for you. So, if you’re a small business, it’s probably going to be outside of the budget you want to spend to get to market.
Tim Bucciarelli:
And does Open Commerce have a built in CMS?
Curtis Schrum:
It does not have a built in CMS, but it integrates seamlessly with most of your easy-to-use ones like Wordpress, DatoCMS, and several others.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Okay. And we’ll touch on Adobe and Magento in a little bit, but just for this conversation let’s touch on two areas – well, three areas I’m curious about. The difference between on prem and SaaS – you already mentioned, actually, which is interesting, the medical industry and having a little bit more control making on prem a little bit more attractive – I’d like to go into that a little bit more.
Also, the whole idea of headless and composable, and what’s your point of view on that.
And if we can, just touch on – this is a little bit of an outlier, but like the role that marketplaces play. Are they still growing? Is it really for the big, big brands and the big, big organizations, or are smaller players getting involved?
So, I guess in that order – if you’d like to talk about the on prem versus SaaS first, that would be great.
Curtis Schrum:
Sure, absolutely. So, I don’t think on prem’s necessarily going anywhere and I feel like that might be much to Adobe Commerce’s chagrin [laughing] because there are industries like the medical industry that need to control their code base, and they need to control every piece of what it touches, what kind of data’s offered and what kind of data isn’t offered. I’ve worked with medical clients in the past – it can be very tricky to navigate those waters. Those types of on prem offerings – there’s always going to be a space for those.
Something like an Open Commerce or things like that – they also offer the option to control your code base, and those are important offerings. There are not many other reasons to go on prem unless you just really want to absorb a lot of risks with owning your website. If you want to absorb the risk of cybersecurity concerns, and keeping your software up to date, and dealing with DDoS attacks, and making sure that Cloudflare and all of those are configured correctly – sure, you could do that.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Or, you can trust, essentially implicitly, in someone else to do that for you.
Curtis Schrum:
You can, and that leads us into SaaS. You know, there is the Adobe Commerce offering that’s cloud-based as well, but really at the end of the day you’re still putting a lot of trust in those cloud performers. I think where your SaaS platforms really pull ahead of the on prem offering – if you don’t have a really good use case where you absolutely need to go on prem – a SaaS offering offers the opportunity to offload a lot of risks and a lot of day-to-day decision making, as well as keeping your platform up to date, to experts that know that platform really, really well, and it’s usually baked into the costs, like with BigCommerce and Shopify.
The cost to maintain a Magento website is, on average, thousands of dollars a month, so it can be very cost effective to go with a SaaS offering.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Yeah. We do some total cost of ownership analyses for prospective clients, and we try to help them understand when they’re looking at SaaS – we come up with some estimates of what their monthly subscription fee will be and we compare that to Magento Open Source, which has no subscription or license fee, but the tradeoff is that you have a monthly support fee and your upfront costs may be a little bit higher.
If you’re migrating to a SaaS platform, yeah, you’re still going to have a fair bit of cost initially. But over time, it’s interesting to see what happens at the six-year mark, for example, to see which one is more attractive for total cost of ownership.
And it really depends, because if you’re at the enterprise level and you’re considering BigCommerce, or Shopify Plus for that matter, then it can be pretty close sometimes with a Magento Open Source option. Where it gets tricky is if you’re looking at Adobe Commerce and trying to compare that. It’s an interesting calculation to do, and actually a very important calculation for any merchant considering those platforms, I would say.
Curtis Schrum:
Yeah, I would agree, and I think that something that can't be overlooked when you’re doing a total cost of ownership is the expense of legacy code that like things that will go by the wayside and not get updated can sometimes come back to bite you. There’s been more than one of those cases this year with other platforms and major software companies that I won’t mention are thrown under the bus right now that have had some oversights from old code.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Right. Okay, so that’s on prem and SaaS. It’s a little bit of a tossup, but Saas generally speaking would be simpler to manage, a little bit less maintenance, a little bit less headache, maybe less or lower total cost of ownership. On prem – a little bit more customizable, a little bit more self-made and controllable. So, interesting distinctions there.
And then we’ve got this other option that’s out there, everyone’s talking about it – of course, headless, composable. What does it mean? Why does it matter? Is it going to be the next big thing?
Curtis Schrum:
Is it going to be the next big thing? Let me tackle that first. A lot of people want it to be the next big thing – a lot of people really want it to be. Whether or not it is, I think depends on how cheap we can get it down to to implement for people because currently, today, putting somebody on a headless website – this is more of a comparison – it comes down for us at Shero to, if you’re considering a truly headless website, you’re probably also considering doing something like Adobe Commerce. Because that’s the level of customization that you’re going to need, it’s going to be the same type of budget.
But let’s talk about what some of those words actually mean, because headless is a very big buzzword in the industry. It used to mean software that could operate without a graphical user interface – that’s what it used to mean – without any type of graphical interface – headless, just ramming on it. Today, it means the application or website where the frontend or presentation layer is separated from the backend or software layer, and it’s a pillar of that mock principle that I mentioned a little bit earlier.
You mentioned composable once I think in here – that’s kind of another big buzzword – and all it really means is building something from a myriad of related, hopefully reusable, components – that’s all it really means.
There’s a lot of other buzzwords out there. But the biggest thing to look at when you’re going headless and what the benefits are, is you’ve got to have a good use case to use a headless website. And by “use case,” I don’t mean speed. Anyone who tells any merchant, “You’re going to be so much faster on headless” – maybe you will – it depends on how it was built.
Shero can get a BigCommerce or Shopify implementation just on SaaS just about as fast as a really well-built headless site. It really just depends on what your site’s doing. If you spend all that money to build a headless site, but one of the APIs you’re connecting to is a soap API written in like 1994, your site’s still going to wait on that API. It doesn’t matter how fast the rest of it is. That data still has to get there.
So speed is not a good use case. A really good use case to want to go headless is when your marketing team or your content team tells you, “We have a story to tell, and we can’t tell it within the box that the SaaS platform or Adobe Commerce has, and we need to be able to let loose our design juices and really just be able to go wild with something.”
Tim Bucciarelli:
Without having to call a developer every time.
Curtis Schrum:
Exactly. Without having to call a developer every time. And there are great tools out there – codeless tools out there, or near codeless tools – to make that happen and put the control in there, and then you really start talking to your clients about what I want to talk to them about, and that’s what I want to talk to customers about is, I don’t want you to spend your money maintaining your website.
I want you to spend your money building cool features, and I want to talk to you about how we’re going to make an innovative push on a new marketing front, or how are you going to create diverse tools for your clients and customers. That’s what we want to talk about – that’s where we want you to spend your money.
Tim Bucciarelli:
I think you capture that idea perfectly, because I think about this, and there’s definitely a category of Adobe Commerce and Magento merchants who are billion dollar companies who can put a lot of money into it, and they can do both. They can manage the bugs, they can manage the updates, they can manage the ongoing maintenance, AND they can do the cool new features. They can do it all. Okay, that’s great.
But then there’s the rest of us kind of this middle ground who want the flexibility and power that Magento and Adobe Commerce can provide, but really are frustrated over the past 10 years with like all of these updates, all of these little intricacies that – you know, if one little thing doesn’t work in a third party module it can throw off something else. Or that custom code – oh, I didn’t test it properly. Or this update threw that off.
It’s very complicated to maintain, and if you are spending all of your money on that maintenance it can be very frustrating for both the agency and the merchant because the agency wants to do new and exciting things on behalf of the merchant. The best thing that can happen for an agency is a client comes to them and says, “I want to implement this new functionality. I’ve got this great idea. Will you help me design it and implement it?” And the agency says, “Ah, I’m sorry. You’re all out of your hours because we had to do that Magento upgrade, or that security patch, or fix those 20 bugs that have been sitting out there languishing for the past six months.”
That’s the struggle. And so that’s the pain that SaaS tries to solve, and I also think – well, I hope, somehow we will be able to get there or a little bit closer to that in the future for Magento and Adobe.
Curtis Schrum:
Well, I will say there are some partners out there that are making some of that reality come true sooner. Shogun, for example, is testing their Shogun Frontend and integrating it directly with Magento, so that is one of those near codeless implementations out there that will make that reality closer for a lot of people.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Okay. We’ll touch very briefly on marketplaces, because I do want to get your take on Adobe and Magento. But marketplaces – big deal, not that big a deal, just kinda going to be there always?
Curtis Schrum:
Well I think they’re always going to be there. If you asked me this question five years ago, I would say huge implications on the market. These days, the biggest impact that I see marketplaces driving is expectations of customers. That trademarked one-click-buy feature that Amazon has – everyone’s trying to find a way to get that or some version of that on their website.
Look at the shipping pushes. Customers aren’t used to waiting four or five days anymore to get something – they’re used to getting it in like three days. During the height of Covid, Walmart made huge strides with BOPUS, buy online, pick up in store. And even the SaaS platforms scrambled – “Oh no, we have to get a BOPUS module and we didn’t even know we needed that.”
So that’s where the marketplaces, I think, these days are having their biggest impact – they’re pushing innovation. But I don’t think marketplaces are competing with eCommerce platforms anymore. Now, I say that and one of the big ones will end up tomorrow releasing their first eCommerce platform and make me look stupid. But I don’t really see them competing with eCommerce that much these days.
And I think to really be successful on those marketplaces, like Wayfair or Amazon’s marketplace, I think you’ve got to have a dedicated team and they’ve got to know how to sell on those, and they’ve got to know how to market it, and they’ve got to really push it out.
And the customers themselves are changing. The way that customers arrive at your website today is not the way they arrived even two years ago at your website. These days, your Instagram and TikTok push almost more volume than Facebook does, and paid ads to websites. Marketplaces struggle to take advantage of those types of platforms. So I think their influence is waning in those areas.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Okay. There’s a time and place for them, but not quite as much as you would have thought a few years ago. Okay, great.
So, on to the question of Adobe and Magento. They’re one in the same. Magento has a long history. How do you feel about what Adobe is getting right with their work in that space and maybe what could they be doing better?
Curtis Schrum:
Oh, that’s a good question. So, what is Adobe getting right? I think Adobe’s doing a really good job shoring up their position in the market space. And I think they’re also fixing two things that Magento did not do well traditionally. One of them is they did really poorly at documentation and training and Adobe’s helping get that right. And the other one is a release cadence of updates.
The release cadence of Magento previously, like 2016, was you might get one one month, and then two in the next month, and then nothing for four months. Adobe’s really helping mature that pipeline and help them understand how semantic version is supposed to work and how to do a release cadence.
Those are the things I think Adobe is getting right day to day, every day. What I don’t think they’re doing quite so right is a lot of people feel like Adobe’s leaving the small to mid market behind. They’re not focusing on innovating other open source tools. Their sales team is not pushing the way that it used to to the same types of clients. They have said publicly that they’re not leaving the small to mid market behind, but most of the builds that we’re seeing these days go to Adobe are very large builds – you know, mere seven figure or better builds. A lot of that has to do with things we’ve talked about here today, because the cost of their Commerce offering, if you’re not going Open Source, is a big hurdle.
They waited way too long – the other thing they didn’t do right, they did incorrectly, is they waited too long to adapt to that API first headless mentality. They went all in, ships forward, on PWA Studio and they have recently said at a town hall this year that that was a mistake. They’re still not adapting quickly enough on their tooling to get there. GraphQL is still something that just does not work, and for merchants GraphQL is a way for getting data that is a more leveled up way to get data, it’s faster, and Magento currently runs on an older software known as MySQL and it is one of the reasons that Magento sites are slow.
So, I think those are the things they are probably doing right and things that they could probably do better at.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Magento Open Source, from what I understand – it seems like it’s like the secondary platform to Adobe. Adobe is very, very focused on getting people onto their Adobe Commerce platform, paying their subscription fee – not even subscription fee, wrong term – paying their license fee, and if they’re on Adobe Commerce Cloud, which is really what they want to sell, also paying them for hosting and some degree of professional services.
And that leaves Magento Open Source in this kind of middle ground, where it used to be so driven by the Community. But now that Adobe is kind of moving in this direction to prioritize Adobe Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud, there’s a feeling by the Community that Magento Open Source is kind of being left behind a little bit.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens there, because that Community is very passionate and very driven and very smart, and I’m very interested and excited, to be honest with you, to see where that Community goes.
Curtis Schrum:
So, we were talking about the open SaaS platform – it’s interesting because I don’t think the Community feels like it’s not being developed. It’s arguably not. Pull requests are not getting merged into the code base, no one’s managing it, no one’s pushing it forward.
If you were to ask me the five to ten years question about open source, I would tell you that in five years I don’t think open source will be actively developed on Adobe. It’ll be security-updated because it’s not going anywhere, but I don’t think they’re going to be accepting updates and pull requests. Somebody’s going to have to fork it and eventually people are going to get tired of having to maintain it themselves.
Because in ten years, I think it’ll be sunset and there’ll be a hitherto unannounced platform from Adobe that will have the bones of Magento 2, but I can almost promise you it won’t be open source – that’s not what Adobe does. And that’s going to be a period in time where merchants are going to start scrambling, and Shero’s trying to get ahead of that. We’re talking to clients now that objectively should not be on Magento.
Like, we’re talking to clients right now, and if it’s a small business merchant or even a mid sized business merchant, open source Magento may very well not be the fit for you and the time to transition to a SaaS platform is now.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Yep.
Curtis Schrum:
You know, save $250,000 over five years worth of updates and put that into your budget to expand your company – like, make the move now; don’t wait five years.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Yeah, because a lot of small businesses got onto it. I mean, Magento Open Source has historically been a very attractive platform for small businesses precisely because it doesn’t have those licensing fees and it’s very powerful. But, that conversation with clients who may be on a platform that’s not still right for them is exactly what we’re trying to do as well. It’s the right thing to do with your clients.
One of the areas, when we talk about Magento Open Source, is that there actually is a fork that exists today, and it’s gaining some traction. I mean, Mage-OS is – I’m not a better man, but I think that that’s got some energy behind it. I’d like to see where that lands in five years.
Curtis Schrum:
We’ve definitely been keeping an eye on it. All of us have been looking at it. If you’ve been in the space a long time – I know a lot of the guys who are working on that. I think that it has a lot of potential. I think there’s also a certain amount of concern that if agencies start adopting the Mage-OS platform, or for some reason Adobe does completely sunset their open commerce, then it’s going to be a fork of nothing. And at the end of the day, even though the Magento Open Source tool is open source, Adobe still owns it.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Yeah, well they certainly own the brand.
Curtis Schrum:
Yeah. So it’s definitely one of those things where that’s tricky, but we’re definitely keeping an eye on it. I think it needs to get more maturity underneath it before we really start relying on it, but it’s definitely something.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Yeah. Okay, so that’s a good snapshot of the various platforms and also various architectural designs, I guess I’d say. I’m also curious to hear your perspective on anything that’s particularly innovative today that you think people should be paying attention to in the eCommerce space.
Curtis Schrum:
Yeah, I’d say there are really two things that are innovative today that people really need to be paying attention to. One of them is, from a merchant perspective, what your digital footprint looks like. What type of message are you telling the people, because that is very much more a conversation today than it was even two years ago, three years ago.
Shero is a member of the Titanium Worldwide Collective – it’s a collective of agencies across a spectrum of mediums that are majority owned by minorities. We’re proud to be a member of them. They help companies and merchants kind of identify what their digital footprint looks like and what kind of story you’re telling.
Tim Bucciarelli:
So, footprint in the sense of sustainability and accessibility?
Curtis Schrum:
Not just sustainability. Two, or three years ago, ADA compliance and accessibility was the only thing people were considering. Now, it’s about how diverse does your company look. What is your footprint offset program? Do you have a diverse workforce? How is the language you’re using on your site heard on the ear by people of different communities?
That’s something that I think merchants need to be paying a lot more attention to, and there are companies out there that can address those in a really respectful way and help companies understand how to adapt to a changing world. Because, we used to make the joke when I first got into software that if you go to sleep and get up tomorrow the software that you read about yesterday is now obsolete, and it’s becoming a world where the way the social norms change are coming very close to that and you need to stay up to date with that.
The website you built last year and the language you used last year, and the photos, and the stories you told last year may not be the story that you need to tell this year. We’re leaving the space of like the 2010s and early 2020s where you could let your site set for two or three years before you gave it a brand refresh. Those days are very rapidly going behind us and companies are going to need to start looking and keeping their brand fresh and up to date every year.
Tim Bucciarelli:
So, Titanium Worldwide – you said that’s a collective of agencies?
Curtis Schrum:
Yeah, not just eCommerce agencies – digital design agencies, stratus agencies – they’re all minority-owned, it’s an excellent organization to chat with and set up meetings within the US. They do have global partners, as well. That’s probably one that I’d say people need to pay attention to and make sure that they’re watching the winds change before they catch themselves on the wrong side of it.
Obviously, selfishly, Shero is also an innovative company that people should pay attention to. But if I had to say there’s one other one out there, there’s an agency in New York City called The Mixx, with two Xs. They’re a digital marketing and design agency that are doing really amazing things, and they’re really changing the spectrum of storytelling for merchants away from the product and focusing on the people.
Tim Bucciarelli:
Yep, there’s an agency in Boston called Proverb and they’ve been doing that also. They’ve been doing a great job in that realm.
I’m glad to hear you say that – that’s very much in line with the way that we think, as well. I think that maybe what we’ll try to do is we’ll pull together some resources that could be included in the show notes that would provide some help to merchants who want to research that and want to do the best they can in, whether it’s sustainability, diversity, or accessibility. I’ve done another episode with Anna Karoń from Snowdog on the topic of accessibility and we can include links to that show, as well.
Curtis Schrum:
Snowdog still has the best mega menu ever built on Magento 2!
Tim Bucciarelli:
Alright, good. Well I’m sure they’ll be glad to hear that – Kuba will be glad to hear that.
Alright. Curtis, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate your opinions and your insights, and I hope that this has been valuable for the merchants listening in. And I hope that Shero continues to build some great sites and I look forward to talking to you next time.
Curtis Schrum:
Absolutely. Thanks, Tim. I appreciate it and I appreciate everybody who took the time to listen.
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