Latest / Leaders on Shopify with John Readman / How brands like Gymshark and Castore scale with better data infrastructure.
Transcript
- John - Leaders On Shopify: Right, we're live. So ⁓ welcome back to leaders on Shopify. I'm super pleased to have an industry legend with us today, Jim Herbert, CEO of Patchworks, who's ⁓ been around a long time in this industry. And I'm gonna let him introduce himself, introduce who Patchworks are. For those of you don't know who Patchworks are, and I suppose Where do they fit in within the Shopify ecosystem? So welcome to the show, Jim. ⁓ over to you. Who are you and who are Patchworks? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Thanks, John. I don't know ⁓ which industry you're talking about. No, I'm kidding. So ⁓ yep, Jim Herbert, CEO of Patchworks. ⁓ I've been in the e-commerce industry for 26 years, ⁓ and I started out as a techie. So built my first website actually '99, so you could go arguing 27. ⁓ on ATG, a really old ⁓ e-commerce platform. But I found out recently still runs about 78 brands around the world. So there we go, got pulled by I know big ones as well, like really big high street names. John - Leaders On Shopify: Ha ha ha Wow. Any ones that you that you built still going? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: ⁓ no, no, not on that. ⁓ but ⁓ I started my own agency in 2007 ⁓ with with three friends ⁓ called Sceneric and we started on ATG. ⁓ moltonbrown.com was one of our first ones we did there. ⁓ that moved to Hybris and we actually became Hybris' number one kind of partner globally, actually. So we had an office in Hong Kong, offices all over the world, ⁓ sold to LBI, consult to publicists, so we all got merged into Sapien, ⁓ just after I left in 2015, actually. ⁓ But some of the Hybris ones are still running, I'm pleased to say. ⁓ so ⁓ we're we're talking to a couple of them right now actually. It's it's a bit weird. If you're in industry that long, sometimes it feels like you're walking around cleaning up your own mess, if you know what I mean. But it was cutting edge at the time and it was good. ⁓ John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. They're like why have we still got this thing you sold us, Jim? Yeah. Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like, ⁓ I remember you. ⁓ it's like, no, I hope it's good. Well, we're still on it. That's that's hopefully a good sign. It's like, okay, that's good enough. No, I think ⁓ yeah, I've been around a long time. I started out from that technology side and ended up in kind of sales and partnerships ⁓ commercially ultimately. Prior to Patchworks, I was the GM of Big Commerce ⁓ in Europe for three years. So again, that was kind of my introduction to actually working software side. I've never really done that, ⁓ which was which was interesting. And, you know, with a Covid tailwind for e commerce, funnily enough. It was it was very successful. ⁓ we expanded across Europe, in Italy and France and Germany, the Netherlands. Italy was a really good area for us, interestingly. So I've got a lot of friends there. ⁓ I'm slightly gutted Shop Talk is ⁓ in Barcelona and not in Milan, but there we are. ⁓ because that would be nice. ⁓ and then obviously started Patchworks in twenty twenty three. ⁓ so Patchworks is an integration platform as a service. We love our acronyms in this industry, right? What does that mean? we're kind of a strategic integration layer. ultimately. So it's all about the the data between Shopify and other e commerce platforms and things like ERPs, 3 PLs, ⁓ occasionally useful marketplaces, but we're not a feedonomics or a channel engine or a rhythm. ⁓ they are specific to to their industries. You know, we are connective tissue with the idea being is that, you know, we exist for two reasons. One, get you live as quickly as possible. ⁓ so ⁓ you know, we have this fantastic user experience that means that ⁓ kind of you still need to have domain knowledge, but you don't need to be a programmer ⁓ to be able to do the integrations. ⁓ and then once you're live, I mean this is the important bit, we are critical business infrastructure. So at Black Friday, we'll auto-scale, right? So when you're deluged with orders and product and inventory have to be accurate, ⁓ you know, Patchworks will keep all that syncing up in in real time. and you know everything that comes into Patchworks is stored and forwarded because things do go down, particularly over Black Friday, but all the time, right? One of our One of our joint partners went down earlier this week, in fact. ⁓ so for for a few hours. And ⁓ when that happens, we make sure that the messages are stored, we're robust effectively. When it comes back, everything carries on like nothing had happened, if you know what I mean. So you're kind of paying for that, ⁓ when you're paying for Patchworks, you're paying for that ⁓ quick to launch piece, but also that critical infrastructure piece, you know, to be a safe and ⁓ a safe platform to to host that data or push that data through. So ⁓ and and we aspire to a you know a four nine, ninety nine point nine nine percent uptime. and ⁓ I think we are at about that at the minute for the last six months, which is which is fantastic, not surprisingly. So ⁓ yeah, that's kind of h where we are as a business. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. And and that sort of leads me into when people sort of move on to Shopify, they think it's like super easy. Right. If it was super easy, you wouldn't exist, I think. Yeah. So what so ⁓ and one of the things the people listening to this are normally sort of scaling brands, maybe people who've moved from a Magento or maybe a big commerce ⁓ and they're moving on to Shopify and they want to scale from maybe Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Yeah, fair point. Yeah. John - Leaders On Shopify: I know, five million to twenty million, what are the sort of common challenges and and things, not necessarily that just Patchworks fix that these businesses are gonna have as they scale? What are the things that you're seeing within the ecosystem? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Yeah, it that's a that's a really good point, right? And you know, why do we exist? Why do Shopify agencies exist as well, right? It is easier to use Shopify than anything else. Of course it is. ⁓ But ⁓ you still need the domain knowledge, you still need to understand, you know, what's what the the World Wide Web looks like ⁓ for for commerce, right? You know, in your SEO and ⁓ and all your data and analytics and being able to improve your conversion rate, all that stuff. There are still experts out there for that. ⁓ People coming to us from that kind of cohort, that five to ten million, you know, we've got customers like Castore I think when we started working with them, they were doing ten million a year. ⁓ I think they did three hundred and twenty five million last year as a good example. So ⁓ Gymshark was another custom all down to patchwork. It's clearly nothing to do with the fact they've got fantastic clothes brilliant branding and excellent teams, right? Nothing to do with that at all. It's all down to technology. No, I'm very proud to work with them. They're they're they're a great brand. John - Leaders On Shopify: All all down to all down to Patchworks. Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: ⁓ Gymshark's another one, actually. You know, we were one of the first tech partners of them, and you know, ⁓ they've broken a billion dollars last year as well. ⁓ from again, I think we were working with them at about eight or ten million as well before my time, but they've been a customer for a very long time. quite a lot of these businesses, you know, they do their first integrations using out of the box apps, right? And and there's nothing wrong with that, it makes sense, right? So there's a Net Suite app, for instance. ⁓ although if you're already on Net Suite, you're probably getting above that five million ⁓ area. But you know, there's a Xero app, there's a bunch of apps out there. makes perfect sense, right? Why wouldn't you do that? And and and I would I I would advocate you do do that, right? If you're a ⁓ a brand that started out and you're going one to five, you're probably not going to need Patchworks unless you've got some very specific requirements. Of course, as you get bigger as a business, your business gets more complicated, you need to add in some custom fields, you need to integrate more bits of software, ⁓ you need ⁓ you need that surety as well, because you know with the apps you can't necessarily they don't necessarily guarantee an uptime percentage of over Black Friday, for instance. ⁓ and quite often they'll come to us because they've got seven apps and they're written by seven different developers and never the twain shall meet, right? You know, it that the you know, this app didn't know you'd be running alongside that app. And so this does things at this time of the day and that doesn't sync up properly at that time of the day. And you end up there used to be in the old days of I ⁓ of of of tech, right? Because I've been I was in tech for ten years before I started in e commerce, very old man now, it's fifty three a couple of weeks ago. ⁓ the ⁓ we used to talk about like building on the Microsoft platform. We call something called DLL Help. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Where all these competing bits of software be trying to do the same thing and like things literally wouldn't work if you were doing bespoke development on that platform. You kind of get in that situation with Shopify. So with with Patchworks, and it's a common enterprise integration pattern, when you get to that five million, you're looking to get to 50 million, if you build a firm foundation and you have this strategic integration layer, it allows you to plug and play and swap things a lot more easily and deal with those customizations that your business needs. That's why we exist. ⁓ John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. And Yeah, no no and and if there's a lot of hype around at the moment, whether it's agentic commerce or whether it's what Google announced last week at Google Live with changing all the stuff, what do you sort of think's a little bit overhyped at the moment? What do you think is people are getting distracted by maybe they should just focus on running their business properly? What what what are people getting distracted by? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: ⁓ I mean, ⁓ so we're part of the Commerce Operations Foundation, a standard that was created for ⁓ Agentic Commerce, ⁓ just before, like two months before ⁓ Google ⁓ and and Shopify announced their standards at NRF ⁓ in in January, right? So there you go, there's three standards already. ⁓ yeah, just what you need, right? It's more standards, brilliant. ⁓ I think agentics not overhyped, but I think well no, I do think it's overhyped. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, the B C P. Yeah. Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: I mean we have a real tendency in this industry to ⁓ and have done in the twenty six years I've been in it, not surprisingly, to say, ⁓ this is just gonna take over everything, right? So again, back in two thousand and say five and we were doing some some other ATG work, ⁓ it was very much e-commerce is gonna destroy the high street. Now, to be fair, my local high street is full of vape shops, ⁓ but there are still clothes shops on there, right? ⁓ and and and there's still people ⁓ you know, working there. And actually there are still big out of town retail parks where it's more of a unified commerce approach. And I think if you looked at US commerce last year in general, I think it was 83% was still done in store. Now that probably includes some pick up in store stuff that's been ordered online. ⁓ but it won't be all of that 83%. It'll be nowhere near all of that. So the hype 20 years ago was physical retail is dead. And I think there is a lot of hype in agentic commerce that that's the only way people are going to buy. And it's not the only way people are going to buy. It'll be another channel for me. I think, you know John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: ⁓ so so but as somebody said at the World Economic Forum earlier this year, if you're writing checks for half a trillion dollars for data centers, you've got to say you're changing the world, right? So ⁓ John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah. I I I think the way I look at it is everybody saying agentic's gonna kill the internet and the internet was gonna kill the high street. I think fundamentally it's about giving people choice to find your stuff where they wanna find it. Right? If they wanna go find it in a shop and have that experience, there's physical high street. If they wanna browse and look on the the web or if they wanna discover it in L an LLM L ⁓ and maybe buy it in an LLM L ⁓ Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Agreed. Yeah. John - Leaders On Shopify: then that they're gonna be able to do that. So yeah, it but I do agree it's everybody's getting a bit distracted and I think a lot of well, it depends on who's listening, but if you're the head of e commerce listening to this and your CEO will be will be it's on their radar because they're hearing about it, they're reading about it. But actually maybe you need to improve your conversion rate in your basket first. ⁓ 'cause actually that's probably the biggest lever you could pull in your business right now to to help you make more money. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Completely agree. And it's interesting that, right? Because you know, what does agentic mean? You know, if it if it means an agent independently buying on your behalf, that's and that's the real hype, right? We're not quite there. It's happening. I think I saw a ⁓ a post ⁓ from somebody at PayPal saying the world's first ever agentic ⁓ flower buying was done on Valentine's Day, although I cheaply put on LinkedIn or nothing says romance more than than getting an agent to buy your wife some flowers, right? So it's like Right, it's yeah. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah. That's nearly as bad as buying the flowers from the garage, that is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Plastic flowers, get them next year as well. It's perfect. ⁓ so ⁓ but if you're talking about cause to your point about conversion rate, I was out with the CTO of a of a billion dollar plus luxury handbag business, ⁓ and I think they've got a number of other brands within that ⁓ organization in January. And he said Black Friday last in twenty twenty five, they saw a thirty well twenty I think it was thirty to forty five percent conversion rate, depending on the day, from Search. So the other thing that people call a agentic commerce is people going and asking ChatGPT, find a handbag. And of course they're doing a photograph, finding something like this, or they're uploading a celebrity and saying, I really like that. What is it? Can I buy it? When that then took them to their website, because it was kind of a a considered purchase and it was like, it's this product, do you want to go and buy it? Conversion rate was massive. So there's an immediate ⁓ impact on the way you structure your data. Your product data needs to be there, you need to be available in the scene in LLMs right now, I would say. But to your point, There's all this hype over here. The hype last year was all about marketplaces and TikTok shop. But that's what we're seeing from our customers. They're seeing really big impacts on that. So if you were listening to this today and you're not on TikTok and you're not on other marketplaces, probably go and explore that as well before AI. AI is maybe a year away, right? So John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I I think you're right. There's still a lot of the other thing we've seen recently as well is people aren't actually doing YouTube properly. Right. And if you think about now how the younger generation absorb content, it might be on a TV, but they're watching YouTube on the TV. And there's tons of really interesting ways to get more traffic to your site or get more eyeballs on your brand. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Yeah. John - Leaders On Shopify: that maybe you didn't think was in your gift but actually it's it's it's very ⁓ very sort of affordable. So you work with loads of big brands, right? And it this may not be one of your brands, it might be one of your brands, but you've you're working with Gymshark, you're working with Castore some massive brands. What do you think the brands who are genuinely winning on Shopify, what are they doing? And how do they understand their performance that maybe other people are just guessing at? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Hundred percent. Yeah, I think ⁓ the the ones that we're seeing are really winning. ⁓ so somebody like a a Mint of Velvet, for instance. ⁓ so they they just did a sale and it was phenomenal performance for them. ⁓ I can't talk about it too much, but it's the best sale they've ever done. ⁓ and that's partly enabled by the technology. Again, great product, right? So so all these brands, we're just sitting there helping them sell what they've got. So if your product's no good, You I've worked I with a high street name that went bust a few years ago. Everybody listen to this who's in our industry will know who I'm talking about, but hopefully your listeners won't, because I don't want to accidentally slag them off. But you know, I I would argue the product wasn't as good ⁓ as it used to be. And funnily enough, people weren't necessarily gonna buy it, even though the new website was that much better, if you know what I mean. So but if you've got a good product and then you've got an agile tech stack, ⁓ it allows you to to to bring in other bits of software that can then really help you. So it could be that you're bringing in TikTok shop, like I mentioned, you've got a great product. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Get it in front of everybody, ⁓ get the YouTube ads out there. what they're also doing, and this isn't Patchworks, but you this is just the conversations my CS team have, is is making sure that they then understand what those best performing channels are and where to put those investments, right? So what's my best performing ad channel? ⁓ you know, ad prices that are going through the roof. ⁓ so actually that's getting quite difficult to understand. And it's you know, what's really working for me? Am I going after the right markets? Am I going after the right cohort of people? Could I do better personalized targeting, all that kind of good stuff? You need analytics data for that. ⁓ and and so the ones that are doing well on our platform, they're all over it. They've got data lakes, they've got other bits of software. I don't want to particularly plug yours, John, but you they definitely you are using it, right? So ⁓ you know, it is your podcast. So I will say ASK BOSCO® they are using that as well. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: ⁓ so but you know, th that's that's the key thing is understanding that data, but then having the feedback loop to put it back into what they're actually making decisions based on it, right? John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, I think yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think the the biggest conversation we have, mainly with like Shopify owners, right? They're getting a little bit sick of just ROAS, so return on ad spend. And they want to understand, well, which campaign sold what product and how much margin after all my costs of goods sold and everything else, how much money did I actually make from spending it that ad over here? ⁓ And that historically, without technology like yours or ours, was really difficult to join together. But I suppose with good foundational technology and good analytics, you can get to those answers now, and then you can drive your bit your business sort of better. So ⁓ in terms of right, well, we haven't talked too much about AI, we talked a little bit about ⁓ agentic stuff. One thing we've been asking a lot of our guests, Jim, is What's your view or your client's view on AI And I think in a few months we might not even ask this because it's just going to become normal. But AI image generation, right? Is this, are you a are you an advocate? Are you against it? What are your clients doing? Is it is it just becoming normal? Because if you'd have asked me nine months ago, I would have sort of said it's not good enough. Then about Christmas time, it got pretty good. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Okay. John - Leaders On Shopify: And now we work with companies and they're industrializing their process to produce. And maybe they can't afford to ⁓ go and do a photo shoot in in Mallorca, right? So ⁓ what's your view, what are you seeing your clients doing, ⁓ and it all changing? And I suppose how does that change the infrastructure layer to support that? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Yeah, I think ⁓ I I think some of our larger customers and and a lot of our customers are high street brands as well, right? So ⁓ it's not just online, it's about the you know, they they they buy online pick up in store. So the the photography has to match what you're gonna pick up for obvious reasons. So it has to be really, really good ⁓ to make that work. So some of them are still using photographers, but you know, they're not having to spend as much on it bluntly, because It doesn't have to be in a light box and really well done, if you know what I mean, because that's one thing that AI is really good at is taking that product and then putting it onto a different background or or removing the you know the the noise from it, making it look really good, but it's still definitely that product, right? As opposed to generate it from this photo that a supplier in China sent me before I put it up on the website, right? ⁓ the smaller and mid ones though are using AI, ⁓ and some of them are able to do it industrially, like you said, ⁓ themselves. And and look, frankly, you you wouldn't necessarily notice a difference. So John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Look, why not? Right? It's very, very important. ⁓ I don't know personally, you know this better than me, how that impacts any of the kind of search engines. ⁓ because I know they they kind of I don't know but you know, they're gonna rank it down as it as as it goes forward. John - Leaders On Shopify: there's no ev th they reckon Google is saying they're ranking down AI written content if it's obviously AI written, right? They're saying that. Th there's no evidence yet about AI generated images, we don't believe. But then that just comes down to good old fashioned have you got the right label, have you called it the right thing, and good old fashioned sort of solid SEO basics. ⁓ but Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Right. Okay. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, is there gonna be metadata in all these images at some point where it's AI or it's not AI? There's a thing on Instagram, if you upload an AI product image, it actually says it's AI. so yeah, I I think it's but one thing we have definitely seen is if you've got lifestyle shots, you get better conversion rate, right? So Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Yep. Right. Yeah. John - Leaders On Shopify: if this enables you to get more lifestyle shots, then it's probably a good thing and you're gonna get better conversion rate. So you should definitely be sort of playing at it and ⁓ and and and sort of tamper like testing it out, I think. So yeah. So Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: I agree. It's On that note though, a couple of little ⁓ interesting asides. Number one, I I'm one of those YouTube people actually. ⁓ we actually pay for the YouTube Pro account Family Edition, because I've got I've got two kids, right? oddly, we were going through the here's all the streaming we spend on conversation last weekend with the family and it was the it was the number one one that no one wanted to get rid of. It was like, ⁓ you know, we can even get rid of Sky. ⁓ but at the end of the day we definitely want to keep that because, you know, ad-free YouTube's quite useful. ⁓ John - Leaders On Shopify: ⁓ fancy. Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: But ⁓ I was watching a video on there the other day. Microsoft put up a new laptop ad ⁓ for this new ⁓ Slim pad that they put on. AI generated, obviously. ⁓ the operating system that AI decided to put on the screen was Microsoft Windows Vista. ⁓ so it was like, Okay, that's about four versions ago. So keep a human in the loop, right? Is what is was what I would say there. Make sure that the quality controls are in if you're going down that route. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: The other I thought be interesting for your audience to to hear about was something that started happening about seven weeks ago. It got raised to us, people asking us if we had a solution for it, which is ⁓ AI's democratising everybody, right? It's not just the the retailer, the the customers as well have got access to this. And it's fake returns. So some of the returns platforms and some customers pay out before they've got the product back, right? So ⁓ I might even say keep the product. I don't want to put it back into my returns warehouse, I don't have to completely put it. So people are getting photos of of stuff that's been John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: faked, obviously faked on AI, with a rip or something else saying, ⁓ it it arrived like this, in the hope of getting to keep it, we're not having to send it back. ⁓ and of course, you know, if it's going for a standard returns platform, there's your payout. Thanks very much and everything else. But afterwards they've gone through the the quality control and they're ⁓ bad actors. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So and I know there are solutions coming out for that. ⁓ so I was speaking with the guys at Back Tech the other day. John - Leaders On Shopify: And they're like, hang on, yeah. But that is a good watch out for people, is yeah, I suppose everybody's got this technology in their hands and there are some dishonest people on the planet. You hear stories of people where the box goes back, it gets weighed and it's not actually got the product in because but because it weighed the right amount, it gets put back on the shelf and off and yeah, you you hear loads of horror stories like that. So, ⁓ I read a post on LinkedIn. That you're doing some very cool stuff within your platform with ⁓ your own sort of LLMs. What are you doing? Tell us all about it. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: So I'm I mentioned at the start, you know, one of the reasons we are ⁓ Shopify's only certified technology partner, the highest level of partnership for integrations, is because, you know, one of the things, one of the key reasons for using us is to get live as quickly as possible, right? And Shopify want that for lots of good financial reasons. The more quicker you're live, you're on Shopify, right? You're on Shopify. it makes a sense. ⁓ and we did that with our user experience. So we had a phenomenal user experience. It's all drag drop, copy and paste shapes, you know, it's all you like to say, you don't need to program as such, so we have to build out those flows. ⁓ why not do the same sort of thing for AI as well, right? Provide that experience for people because people are getting used to that. You know, if if I'm writing a board deck, for instance, ⁓ I will go in and outline what I want on the slide and I'll Claude have a go at it, or Gemini have a go at it, and then I'll, you know, make the changes that I want to make. It's an accelerator. So this Wednesday just gone, we launched our AI studio with the first step being the implementation agent. And the implementation agent does that. ⁓ so the idea is you can say connect Shopify to Netsuite for orders, using Shopify GraphQL to make sure that you use the right, you know, endpoints and everything that Shopify wants you to do. ⁓ make sure that the customer exists in NetSuite before you re put it up there as well. And it will go off and it will build out that flow. Now it probably won't work first time. ⁓ I've I d personally didn't get access to it myself with until launched I don't get access to the the different environments. No, CEO in it, right? John - Leaders On Shopify: They they don't let me do that. Yeah. I I'm the same. I'm not I'm not allowed to play with the back end. Yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: ⁓ I've also been burning tokens all week, right? So from from my side. So ⁓ I think they'll be taking that access away again. ⁓ and I've built some, I built a HubSpot for Net Suite, for instance, ⁓ and that worked first time, so it's like brilliant, it does work. But it's an accelerator. ⁓ so so what it will do is it'll build up the flow, it'll create the things, but then you go through and check it. The key thing is it'll map the fields, ⁓ and again that's that's big because there's you an order that's got a load of fields on it, say like thirty-eight fields normally in a Shopify to NetSuite one, ⁓ it will do that as well. So the idea is it allows our customers to go live quicker than ever, ⁓ because they can go in and prompt with that with that functionality. ⁓ the field mappings, the flow will be built there. ⁓ you make your small changes that you need to make to to make sure it's productionised, make sure you test it, because again, you know, all the AI horror stories you see in the news about AI deleting this database in production is because it doesn't have the guardrails in place. All those guardrails still exist, all the kind of ability to deploy those flows that we had when you're doing it by hand, they're just there. AI is a kind of wrapper around it, if you know what I John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: ⁓ and and and so ⁓ and then deploy it out and you can go live really quickly. Our partner what I loved about this is our partner's been raving about it online and and that's the that that to me means that we've we've hit the right thing. Yeah, exactly. John - Leaders On Shopify: I know. That's real testament. That's yeah, yeah. And I suppose is this gonna make it even more accessible for the non-technical person? So at the moment it's quite accessible because it's drag and drop and click and point. But if I can just talk to it using my WhisperFlow and say, I wanna do this, this, this, this and this, and then it'll at least start the process. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Exactly. Definitely. That's exactly what it'll be. That that's and it's all available. We have a thing called an MCP server, another acronym. ⁓ that allows you to ⁓ in integrate Patchworks into Claude or into Gemini or into ChatGPT, right? ⁓ you could everything I just mentioned you can do via that as well. So you might be a non-technical user. I mean eventually I think we'll be able to get it into Sidekick in Shopify, right? ⁓ so again it'll be, hey Sidekick, help me with this branding, do da da da. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Hey, can you build me an order flow into NetSuite? ⁓ and if we can get that all working, then obviously you've got to buy a Patchworks account to make that happen. But ⁓ behind the scenes, you know, that that that could ⁓ that that could all go through. So that's that's why it's exciting. The other bit, John, is what we're launching in the future. So ⁓ we one of our key features, I think, called Connector Builder, allows you to connect to anything, doesn't have to be in our marketplace. That gets massively improved in our July release. It nearly went out in June. ⁓ but but in July that gets released. So if we don't have a connector, it'll go off to the internet. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: find APIs and build that connector and then you can bring that into the flow as well. So that's going to be a a bit of a game changer, I think. And then the on top of that, we're launching what we call our custom agents. So that gives our partners and our customers the ability to build their own agents running within Patchworks. Now what's interesting about that is it's not necessarily about the implementation then. It's about the data. So if you've got something like ⁓ great example will be remember I talked about the app nightmare earlier on we've got a customer that's on our old platform which is nearly gone now. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: ⁓ they installed TikTok ⁓ as a marketplace using the TikTok app. Turns out TikTok apps, ⁓ TikTok orders in Shopify don't have a billing address. Why would they? Because, you know, TikTok is taking the their taking the account data, right? It's taking the billing. ⁓ our old platform, being a piece of code, we went, don't I do with that? I need a billing address, right? A custom agent for self-healing data could be created that looks for that and goes, ⁓ hang on, hey guys, I noticed some orders coming through. ⁓ that don't have billing address on, would you like me to copy the shipping address across automatically for you instead? That's the kind of thing that our customers and partners will be able to put into our ⁓ our our custom agent sort of store effectively on on the platform. So I think that gets really exciting at that point for for everybody in the ecosystem because you can start to automate your business on critical business infrastructure even easier. John - Leaders On Shopify: And that's sort of stuff that's getting flagged to someone in some customer s service team who's then having to probably manually copy and paste or or the order gets rejected 'cause it's not got the right stuff in and it just causes problems and becomes a bottleneck, yeah. So Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Exactly. Yeah, it gets stuck in Shopify, doesn't get shipped, right? And you know then you get the first thing you hear about it is somebody angry rings up saying, Where's my order? John - Leaders On Shopify: So you used to be a member of the Mac Alliance Council. Is that right? Yeah. And what's your view now on sort of compost ⁓ composable composable ⁓ even, yeah, ⁓ or headless type environments versus the out of the box Shopify? What's your view on what that whole cause it Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Yeah. Yeah. John - Leaders On Shopify: What was it about three, four years ago, maybe five years ago, with the whole Mac alliance was right, well you're just gonna plug all these bits together. Whereas now Shopify's certainly from a front end point of view saying, Well, we've got it. You don't need to do that. What's your view? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Yeah. Yeah. I I think as a retailer or as a business person in general, you should concentrate on what your actual needs are, right? So ⁓ the I would argue that the composable commerce ⁓ movement came about if you were on an old ATG hybrid demandware type of platform. and you probably had a business need to be able to control content on the front of your website. ⁓ crazy need, who would want that? Who who would know who would want to be able to change what their website says without having to go to a developer and say, Can you rewrite some HTML? Yeah. John - Leaders On Shopify: Raising raise a ticket, get in a queue, wait six months, yeah. Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: My my sister worked at ⁓ Ordnance Survey, I can say this now, but I'm sure it's out of a well it's not even an NDA anyway, about twenty years ago. And they had they had a content management system, but it was so complicated, they just raised a ticket and get IT to do it 'cause it was easier that way. ⁓ so ⁓ so so with composable commerce, headless, you could take the the the front end away from a hybrid or whoever it was, ⁓ put in a ⁓ a a CMS to control that experience and suddenly your business users had a lot of control, right? And made absolute perfect sense. ⁓ John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Shopify of course has that ability. ⁓ So you look at it and you go, why do I need that in that case? Now it might be that you need more complex ⁓ So you might want the ability to do things like schedule content being delivered on Christmas ⁓ Now, some of that probably gets answered by sidekick now. And also the Shopify page builder is always getting improved to allow you to do bits and pieces like that. So I think I think the key thing is to put your business requirements first and say, why am I doing? Because you could you can burn lots and lots of money going down that composable and headless route. And we do have customers that went down the headless route with Shopify who are now going back to Shopify because ⁓ with the latest theme technology that you've got there, it's it's good enough for what they wanted. They just at the time they needed something that you couldn't do, and now you can do it. So why would you? And I think that's that should drive everything. And I think the Mac Alliance in general is moving more towards an AI world anyway, because of that. ⁓ you know. I think what the Mac Alliance is very good for, they're all the people in that organization are all excellent. Like everybody I speak to the Mac Alliance, they're really clever. They've all been in retail for a long time. They understand the technology very well. ⁓ they're kind of like, yeah, all right, we've done our job of making people be more composable, API for I Shopify is not in the Mac Alliance, but you can't argue it's not microservices, it's not cloud native, it's not API. It is, it's all those things, right? So they're kind of like, our work here is done, but AI, let's kind of cut through the hype and then ⁓ make sure that people John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: get useful things out of AI, which is what they're moving on to. ⁓ and look, we are a Mac Alliance member still at Patchworks. ⁓ and and that the fact that we have that technology is why we've been able to move so fast. You know, again with this AI launch, we on Wednesday, we were talking about it in our board meeting last week. A lot of what we've launched wasn't even possible a year ago. But because everything we have is API native and effectively we are a headless IPass, you know, the fact that we were able to change our drag and drop front end and improve it so much this year. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, true. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: It's because we could follow those principles. The principles were sound. So ⁓ so I I I think but again, if I'm a retailer at five million, don't necessarily go chuck the baby out of the bath water and go, ⁓ to go full composable to get fifty million. You absolutely do not. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. Yeah. And ⁓ one thing we ask all our guests is right, Shopify and we talked about like ⁓ like integration debt and we talked about ⁓ people maybe having too many apps and the apps don't talk to each other. But Shopify is there's t tens and tens of thousands of apps, but what's the sort of maybe one killer app that maybe people aren't aware of? So you can't say Klaviyo right? Everybody knows about that, right? ⁓ Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Ha ha. John - Leaders On Shopify: But what is maybe a really super cool app that would help scaling brands that maybe people aren't aware of that you you would recommend? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Well, that's a good quit. I obviously there is a Patchworks app. I've got to talk about that one. So John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. A p Part of the batch works, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: And to be fair, if you install it, it basically says connect it to your Patchworks account because we're for integration. ⁓ I mean, yeah, that's a that's a that's a really interesting one. I would say look at the returns apps. ⁓ again, if you're talking about profitability of a business, ⁓ our own marketing team put out they've obviously been listening. Finally, the old man gets listened to, joking, but you know, the the the revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is king. ⁓ that's a very good way to run a business, right? So you can sell as much as you like, but if sixty percent of it's getting returned. then ⁓ that's no good to anybody, is it, if you know what I mean? So I think, you know, I I won't say one app in particular, but sort of ZigZag, ⁓ Swap, Reveni, people like that. Having a returns platform that can control your returns and and do things with them. You know, it's Super Cycle Design, interesting one there where it can come back in and go and be resold in a very nice way. I think that's a really good way of looking at adding cash to your bottom line. Ditto, I think there's some good stuff from like Inventory Planner by Sage. or Ware ⁓ if you've got physical stores to make sure you've got your ⁓ stock in the right place ⁓ they're they're amazing apps from that perspective because the the business case actually is really interesting. Like if you're in a if if if you realise that it's large, I went to see Craft Work on Tuesday night, guess what? They sold out of XL T shirts because I would argue the the demographic of the audience was was a was a certain size, right? And that happens in physical retail all the time. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah, yeah. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: So if you can make sure you've got more of the right products in the right places, and you don't have to go on sale with those products, you can get to sell them at full full price, that drops more and more to your bottom line and and that's what pays the bills, right? Is is is the profit. So ⁓ yeah, I think those those two apps are are very much up there. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. And ⁓ in terms of like where do you see sort of Shopify going? 'Cause we've all been to the different Editions conferences, we we we we're all following and they do their big releases. Where do you see sort of Shopify in two years' time? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Yeah, I think the the Sidekick integration is gonna gonna be very interesting ⁓ and go further and further. ⁓ because ⁓ and and you know, I I think it's always a worry for a Shopify agency, for instance, who's like, ⁓ you know, there's so much in the software, but that's our job as software providers, right? It's to put more and more in it, ⁓ from that perspective, which will just make it easier to use, right? So I think what I love about the Shopify platform is is its ease of use. The whole point of it is to put as much as possible into the hands of the user, ⁓ with as least as possible needing development. Exactly the same as our kind of way of looking at things at Patchworks as well. So so that will just mean it gets adopted more and more. And I think it's going to get adopted more and more by very large high street brand brands and and ⁓ obviously in the UK and obviously in the US as well. I know ⁓ like one of the US's largest fashion brands ⁓ has bought Shopify and is putting it into all of their sub brands for instance. ⁓ now that's gets interesting from the POS perspective as well. Cause I think where maybe Shopify was lagging behind a little bit. ⁓ I've got friends I've actually built a Shopify website over the last few years for a friend of mine and worked on their POS stuff. Editions last year, last winter, the one we were named in, ⁓ I'm very pleased to say, ⁓ you know, Toby and Harley were showing off the new POS and talking about that. That's another example. But as you're working with these ⁓ complex older brands, There will have some edge cases that will come into the platform. And the joy of SaaS, of course, ⁓ of software as a service, is that when you add those in for one brand, it's available to all brands. So I think it will become oddly more complicated, but in a good way. It will give you that ability to go, ⁓ I can do that in the platform now. I didn't I used to need an app for that, or I need integration for that, which is slightly worrying. ⁓ and I can now do that within Shopify itself. So I but I do just continue seeing it with you know taking on that dominance. And I think oddly it's still got quite a small percentage of the overall market. If you look at Shopify. compared to everything, which means that the sky's the limit, right? John - Leaders On Shopify: And and and I I wasn't gonna ask you this question, but I'm gonna sort of ask you anyway, because you used to be the big boss at ⁓ Big Commerce. ⁓ but yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓ but now if I'm a sort of medium sized brand selling clothes online, is it Shopify or is it Big Commerce? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: I need a mayor. Wow. Wow. Thank you. I'm going to ruin one of the partnerships here, John. Thanks. John - Leaders On Shopify: ⁓ are you No, but I suppose this is the leaders on Shopify podcast and I'm not trying to catch you out or or when is Shopify right and when is big commerce right? There you go. That's an easier way to answer it. That's an easy one. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: No, it's fair. It's fair. Yeah, I that is an easier one. Look, I think I think it comes back to my conversation about composable. ⁓ and I was only joking by the way, that there is an answer to this. ⁓ you you choose the software that works for you, right? This sounds a bit of a meaty mouth answer, but I'll give you some specific examples. So it could be that if you want to operate in areas where there isn't Shop Pay, Big Commerce is probably better for you in in that area from a payments perspective, right? Because They've got so many different payments providers, they give you that payment flexibility that, you know, you can actually start selling into a market and probably make, you know, a better profit out of that ultimately, because it'll be a cheaper payments deal. So if you're in the Balkans, for instance, or you're doing a lot of work cross-border into those areas and that suddenly turns out to be one of your one of your areas. If you're a fashion brand, Big Commerce is still definitely worth looking at there. ⁓ there's no secret Big Commerce themselves, if have focused more around the business to business and wholesale side. ⁓ ⁓ where they still have, you know, better functionality to be blunt. ⁓ they have things like company hierarchies that don't exist in Shopify. And, you know, I'm I'm not sure Shopify's brilliant for sort of small B2B or simple B2B, but if you get into that kind of quite ⁓ complex B2B world where you need multi-price lists with a company hierarchy and different prices at different hierarchical levels, are they even gonna wanna play in that space, if you know what I mean? A big commerce has got a really good niche there and does really well. So so I I would argue those are good examples. Of where you know, you know, you choose BC instead of Shopify. Again, though, Shopify, ⁓ as they famously like to talk about at those conferences we go to, three and a half thousand developers, heavily use of AI in development. We see the amount of features that appear every time they do an Editions release. ⁓ how long will that be the case, right? If if Shopify wants to get into a niche, it will get into a niche. So it's it's a very, very safe choice. We used to we used to joke back in the day, right? And this is like in the 90s. ⁓ you don't get fired for buying an IBM, right? If you're an e commerce director, you don't get fired for buying Shopify to find now John - Leaders On Shopify: Thing right. Yeah, I think there's a definitely a sort of tell me why I wouldn't go on to Shopify rather than which one should I go on to now, isn't there? ⁓ so well I'm super excited. I'm gonna see you next week in Barcelona. That's gonna be fun. That's gonna be fun. ⁓ so if people wanna find Patchworks or they wanna find you, how do they get in touch, Jim? Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Yes. Yes, looking forward to it. ⁓ I'm on LinkedIn. ⁓ my LinkedIn handle, is that right? I used to be a CB radio enthusiast back in the day, ⁓ is Jim Herbert e-commerce. ⁓ and you'll find Patchworks on patchworks.io. We launched our new website ⁓ a couple of weeks ago. ⁓ we we came from the background of being an integration agency. That's why we have so much kind of inherent knowledge of of how to build proper integrations that work. ⁓ but obviously over the last three years transform the business into a pure software platform with partners that do that work or customers that do it themselves. And so the website had to reflect that. So patchwork.io, it's also a lot easier to say than the old URL. ⁓ and if you go on there, you can book a demo, you can see ⁓ you know, some great cust case studies on there with Bellstaff, Mint Velvet, Castore people like that. ⁓ and yeah, we we are definitely open for business. ⁓ we we're we're growing really quickly and it's because integration is still hard, but it shouldn't be. John - Leaders On Shopify: Yeah. Well I'll put all of that in the show notes and thank you very much ⁓ for coming on and sharing your wisdom, Jim. It's been a pleasure. Jim Herbert - CEO Patchworks: Thanks for having me, John. It's been a pleasure for meeting.