Latest / Leaders on Shopify with John Readman / How FireBelly's Mary-Anne Danarzo builds brands that scale on Shopify
Transcript
- John Readman: So welcome back to Leaders on Shopify. I'm really pleased today to say we've got Mary Ann from FireBelly, and we're gonna get into her story, her business's story, why Shopify, she's backing Shopify for the future of her business. I'm fresh back from DocDev in Toronto, so I'm like Shopify'd out this week. Mary Ann, do you wanna first of all introduce yourself, introduce your business, and why are you special and different? Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah, so hi, Mary Ann. you might have seen me or know me from social media. I went big on kind of creating content across TikTok and Instagram back in 2020, talking at all things e-commerce, brand scaling, etc. So my business kind of grew through social media essentially, and that's how a lot of our clients managed to find us and reach out to us and we started working with them, but just to give a bit of context of where I came from, my background, as with quite a few marketers actually, didn't start out in marketing, it started out in sales. my first job out of school was working for a mobile phone accessories business that was buying accessories in the Far East and selling them to retailers in the UK. And over the course of five years, myself and the founder of that business scaled the business from zero to 20 million in the UK, selling out more than Apple in the market for their product categories for cables and plugs. And he did that, and we did that by creating a brand and doing something different and creating something desirable. And so, in the process of being within that business, There became an opportunity where he said, All right, we're about to bring in some serious investment. This is gonna change the shape of how we operate. Are you in or are you out? And he said, if you're out, there's no way you're working for anyone else, you have to go and set up your own business. And so he really gave me the push to to leave and to take all of the knowledge that we'd had from scaling that business into, well, if I can do this with a plug and a cable. Then I'm pretty sure that I can figure this out for everybody else. So that's where the start of my business came from. And because we were selling predominantly to retailers, my network was all retailers and retail CEOs and senior leadership in retail. And so, like our first clients came from retail. And they just, you know, I set up the business, I started posting on LinkedIn, and literally 30 days into that journey, the CEO of W. H. Smith at the time was like, we have no idea what we're doing across socials and we need to in improve that. Can you come and figure it out? And so that was really the start of the business. and obviously at the time I was John Readman: That's not a bad first client. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: It was great. Well, my first client was juice, because I said to my old boss, I said, John Readman: Yeah, yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: you know, we need to if if I'm gonna leave, I need some money. So we need to work this out. and then my second client, as like many agency starts, was my partner's business, which was totally unrelated to e com. It was B2B, but you you gotta start somewhere. So, you know, pulling in lots of different things and then really honing in The thing that I love is brand work, is direct to consumer, is product. And my brain is so split. It's like 50% data, 50% creative, which makes me feel like I've found the thing that I'm supposed to be doing because this to me is brilliant. So that's where we sort of started and since then have worked with lots of different e-commerce brands. most notably, one we're really proud of is we partnered with Color Wow, a big hair company. they sell shampoos, conditioners, that sort of thing. You've probably seen them if you've been on TikTok because they're prolific. we joined them on their journey and within just a short space of time, within eight years from them starting their business, we came in a couple of years later, moved them from Magento to Shopify. And they just recently sold to L'Oreal. So that was like such an amazing journey. it's everything it John Readman: All down to your success. All down to you. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: was all us. Absolutely. No, they have an amazing team, they had an amazing team as well. We just plugged in and were able to really be the strategists that could help give their channels and their teams direction of where they need to be putting their effort and how they needed to be doing that. but I mean. that's a great example of what can happen when you have the right system and setup behind you. Because ColorWow came to us and said, We've got this website on Magento, it breaks all the time. We're running a UK and US operation. Yeah. John Readman: I've never heard that before from a gent. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: They were like, We constantly get outages, things go down. If we try and change a product page, everything breaks. We need to figure this out. and so Hasher, who's Pretty much my co-founder in the dev side was like, all right, we can totally do this, let's migrate them. And so from the migration, we took them immediately from a 1.8% conversion rate to a 3.6% conversion rate instantly, just with the change of the site. So, I mean, that paid for itself, that project, just from start to finish, in terms of what happened for the conversion rate of the website. And obviously, if you're listening to this podcast. you are obsessed with Shopify and trying to grow your Shopify business and you'll know that those those metrics like average order value, conversion John Readman: amazing. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: rate, like if you change those by a tiny bit, they make a massive, massive difference. John Readman: Well, you're so right, Maryam. We talked to so many different people because in the data world, we get obsessed about data. But a lot of people are looking at the wrong metric in my mind. People are looking at how do we get more traffic? How do we get more traffic? Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Mm. John Readman: And then they end up, let's give Google or Facebook more money. And actually, if you could focus on the conversion rate and actually. So the question I often ask Browns is who actually owns the conversion rate number? and what is the plan and what are they doing about it and who's sort of obsessed about it because Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. John Readman: they just often it sits somewhere between e-commerce and development or it sits between marketing or it sits nobody you but I'm like well someone needs to own that. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: You're so right. This is the thing that I found a lot when I started my business is when when we came into organizations and especially if there was multiple agencies working across one organization, that is such a fundamental question. Who owns and is responsible for moving that conversion rate number? Because if nobody is responsible for it, then nothing changes. It doesn't happen. for John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: us, like I mean it's really simple to run around, as we know, content content on different channels drives traffic, which drives people to the site. If the site's well optimized, then those people will convert. But as you said, you can spend a ton of money on traffic. But if the A, if the traffic quality or the language of the content and campaigns you're pushing out doesn't match where they're landing, your conversion rate's gonna drop. If John Readman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: You're sending if you're driving a load of traffic and all the products featured, the customers can't find them, your conversion rate's gonna drop. Like there's so many things that actually influence conversion rate that I think a lot of people get confused around what conversion rate optimization actually is. And a lot of people focus on just the data side of it. And yes, that's important, but there's so there's so many like softer things that matter. John Readman: And I think it goes back to also actually understanding who your customer is Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Mm-hmm. John Readman: and really thinking about why are they buying it. And often Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Why they're there. Yeah. John Readman: people think conversion rate optimization is it a green button or a blue button or a red button? It's so much more than that. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Totally. Yeah. John Readman: And the other one I, it's still an existing client and they can remain nameless. They were like, we've done conversion rate optimization now. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: We've done it, I've heard that so many times. yeah, what did you do? Yeah. John Readman: We're finished. We've done it. We've done that. But they were like, it's finished. And I'm like, what do mean? Surely you can always make it better. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: It's ongoing forever. John Readman: it's a bit like, I've done getting fit and getting sort of healthy. I'm now going to go back to eating dominos. It needs Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Totally. John Readman: to be part of that sort of continuous workflow of the business. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: So much. Yeah. I also think a lot of brands look at conversion rate as like the metric that they measure is average conversion rate across everything, right? But you can double click into that because if we start to look at well, what are our highest product pages? Let's look at conversion rate on a product page level and on a collection page level. Because you can like, as I said, the the if you start to move some of those big pages that are driving the most traffic. In a tiny way, then that's going to have a massive effect on what's happening on the overall conversion rate of the site. Because a lot of people assume John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: conversion rate means, well, let's just optimize checkout and let's optimize like let's focus on that. But the more granular that you can go, based on like 80-20, you know, what are the top 20 pages pulling John Readman: Yeah, yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: in 80% of the revenue? We can make some real moves if we get specific about how they operate. One of the things that we did, which I think that is not done enough in conversion rate optimization is we live and breathe the website, right? The client's website we're working on, as I'm sure you've done in all your projects. You know it inside out. and obviously you really know the brand, you've worked on it, you understand it. But there's a lot of insight that can come from finding out who your top customers are and calling them and having a conversation with them. And asking them to go to the site and browse a new product and tell us what is it that's putting them off, what is it that's turning them on, what is it that's like what are they seeing? Because we can get lost in our in our own bubble of what we think is good, bad, indifferent. And actually at the end of John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: the day, it's the it's these customers that are landing on the pages, they don't have our brains. They're not looking at those pages, are John Readman: And I think Mary-Anne | Firebelly: they? John Readman: that whole qualitative versus quantitative research, everybody's getting obsessed by the data, but it's like, Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. John Readman: we actually spoken to a customer? And I think if you go back to sort of the olden days where someone would walk into a shop, the person who understands the most about how the customers behave is probably the store manager who's talking to customers all the time. But actually, Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Totally. Yeah. John Readman: if we've got an online only business, they're not actually Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Mm. John Readman: having those face-to-face conversations with the customer on a regular basis. So then the Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Totally. John Readman: default is we'll fall back into the data. I couldn't agree with you Mary-Anne | Firebelly: yeah, just to say I on that, there's there's two things that came up for me there. One is that I feel like the more AI is helping us, the less qualitative we are. Because we are assuming John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: that now we can mine more data and we can analyse more data. We're assuming that that's the green light to everything. and the other thing John Readman: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: is Back when I was selling to retailers, like the only thing that mattered for me to hit my bonus was not me selling into the retailers, but making sure that when the product landed in stores that it actually sold out. Otherwise, I John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: would have a constant problem and buyers wouldn't buy from me continually, because they have targets to hit. And I remember going into Tesco one afternoon, one of the retailers that we were arranged in. And I stood in the mobile phone accessories aisle for an hour and a half and I just watched. I just watched customers walking up to the aisle. How were they looking? How were they browsing? A few customers that picked up products, I would go and interact with them and be like, hey, do you mind me just asking? What are you looking for? How are you browse like what's important to you? And at the time we're about to launch a brand new collection of portable charging, power banks. And my CEO at the time, Joe, was like, this is a very complicated area of business because in order to work out what kind of power bank you need for extra charge for your phone, it's a milliamps number, which consumers don't understand what that means, nor do they have the time to try and figure out and work out what does that mean in terms of how many charges am I getting from my phone. So he was like, I'm gonna strip all that language off the packaging and I'm gonna put this is one charge for your phone, two charge for your phone, or this will charge your laptop and your phone. And the conversation that we had with that person in the store at the time was the same thing. They were like, I don't understand what it is that I need, I just know what I need it for and how I wanna charge. And it was like, this kind of mindset can be applied to so many industries. And I think we saw this a John Readman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: lot in hair care as well when we were scaling with ColourWow. Like everyone talks about these technical terms in terms of ingredients and language, but no one really translates that for a customer that doesn't know. John Readman: Yeah, years ago, we, in a former agency, we help people to start sell cars online, right? And that Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Mm. John Readman: was everybody said, nobody's gonna buy a car online. I completely fundamentally disagree. There's no buy now button. That's the only reason nobody. And actually we did some, a load of customer research and it was like 80 % of female buyers who could afford to buy a new car would prefer to buy a secondhand car. privately than go into the dealership. Right? Because the worst thing about buying a car, they didn't want to deal with the people. Right? Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. They didn't want to deal with it. John Readman: So they were quite happy to buy a brand new car online. But what we then did is we started sort of gamifying the end to end process. And it was like to add optional extras, rather than saying that's an extra X per week or per month on the finance, we were putting that's equivalent to like three Starbucks. Right? and just put in little coffee cups. So if you wanted the sunroof Mary-Anne | Firebelly: So good. John Readman: or the alloy wheels or whatever, that's like four Starbucks a month. And Mary-Anne | Firebelly: I love that. Yeah. John Readman: it was just like trying to put it into a real context of, yeah, four Starbucks a month and I get a sunroof and alloy wheels. Yeah, I can do that. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. I think I think again with AI coming in, that the obviously there's amazing things that we can do with AI, but I also think AI is we're losing the ability to look at things like that and to address language and copy. John Readman: Yeah, so there's a very really good friend of mine. called Steve Edge, who's like this branding guy But Steve's severely dyslexic. Can't read or write properly, but runs one of the biggest. not biggest, I suppose, one of the most famous branding. So he rebranded like Fortnum & Mason and loads of famous brands. But he's like, nobody's inventing a dyslexic AI job. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yes. John Readman: My brain just works differently to everybody else. And that's why AI is never going to completely replace proper creativity. And that's why there needs to be humans in the loop, because it can't. think in the way a dysfunctional human brain can think, if that makes sense. Yeah, so, Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. John Readman: and the other thing that, they were talking about at the Shopify.dev conference this week was the most successful Shopify apps now are actually the ones that have the best human onboarding process, the best account management, the best customer success. rather Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. John Readman: than necessarily the best functionality in the app, right? Because people are just getting overwhelmed with extra tech and they probably, yeah, Mary-Anne | Firebelly: as functionality. Well I think it there's Yeah. That was my next word. Yeah. John Readman: they're just using, they're using maybe 10 % of the tech of the app and they don't know how to use it. So they churn or they stop using it. And actually if they could speak to someone to understand how it can impact their business. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Mm-hmm. John Readman: So we were talking about is that possible a bit like triple well? We are, but we've we built it from a sort of practitioner point of view with real human beings behind. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah, which is so different to how everyone is scaling right now, which is, you know, John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: trying to remove as many humans from the the working environment as possible. John Readman: Yeah, So, touched on before about ColorWow and moving people from Magento and you've had lots of experience with lots of other platforms and now you're sort of 100 % in on Shopify. So why is that and what have you seen the sort of shift in e-commerce over the past few years? Mary-Anne | Firebelly: I don't think you can deny the Shopify CEO's motives and intentions of what he wants for his business. Like he is AI first, development first, as you mentioned before, how many developers do they have at Shopify? 5,000 or something? John Readman: 5,500 developers building Mary-Anne | Firebelly: like John Readman: stuff. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: he's putting his money where he knows the value of that platform is. The other things that I think like Shopify is is amazing for someone that doesn't know a thing, right? They can come in and very quickly figure it out, especially now with AI and get a store live. But that doesn't detract from its ability to run major multinational, multi-country stores that work incredibly well. I think the infrastructure of how they've built and how they've also allowed external talent like yourselves to build apps that complement so well with the platform and just work with one-click integrations takes away so much dev time, so much complexity that with pretty little knowledge and a few good points in the right direction of what you need to install, you can go from having something that Like back in the day, if you launched a website and you didn't know what you're doing, you were pretty screwed because like it took a lot of knowledge to understand how to move it forward. Whereas now, you catch someone talking about an app that's helped them with bundling or I don't know, influencers or SEO, and you can get pretty far without anyone needing to come and help. John Readman: Well, I'll give you another example My daughter, who's 16, set up an online bikini business and trunks business where she designs, gets the manufacturing and sells online. And we were like, we'll help you. But actually, she didn't need that much help because she sort of figured out Shopify herself. And then I said, I can help with marketing. I know a bit about marketing. She's like, you wouldn't understand. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: She's like, All right, dad. John Readman: You wouldn't understand my demographic is very different to you. I don't need your help. So she's like, I'm all TikTok and a bit of Instagram and this, that and the other. And they sell hundreds of sets of bikinis every month and shorts and stuff. And she goes Mary-Anne | Firebelly: That's incredible. John Readman: in and updates it all herself. But what's interesting is she's doing all this on her phone, right? Because that's just how she lives her life. All right. So I'm like, why don't you do it on your laptop? Why would I want to do it on my laptop and just do it on my phone? And like... Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Crazy. John Readman: Right? So it's like a proper business. It's yorkyrose.com if you want to have a look. I'm sure she'd appreciate an extra follower on TikTok. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: That's really cool. Yeah. John Readman: And if you, cause you're like, so when we were talking before, he's like, are you FireBelly media? Are you FireBelly AI? You're like fully in on AI as well. And we've done quite well to avoid getting into too much AI. What's Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. John Readman: your sort of take on how AI is going to fit into your business and your clients businesses? Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Well, we, as I said at the very beginning, I'm for like fifty percent data, fifty percent like creative and brand. and so one of the things that I find that really slows down or trips up scaling brands is that there's no cohesive direction for everybody that's working on the mission. So What's the vision? What's the mission? What's the values of the business? Who are the avatars? Like detailed, who are the avatars, specifics, like why do people buy our products? And avatars for me always feels like an accordion, like you add them, you take them away, like you test different ones, but nobody really formalizes the documentation of the avatars. Then we've got tone of voice. Now, traditionally, tone of voice in a marketing deck from market for a branding agency would be a few words, a bit of direction, but nobody can build copy from that. Nobody can build copy from a couple of words that say, well, we're friendly, we're collaborative, and we we don't use marketing jargon. You know, I'm like, okay, great. Well, how do we move that one step further? And so I saw this problem years ago with my own business. When I was struggling to get my team that were working on brands to understand the brand to the depth that I would want them to, you know, getting really deep and being able to create stuff that was going to be on brand, that was going to work without me having to like review everything. And so I was like, okay, well, we need to really ensure that we've got the verbal and the visual elements of brands very, clear. And when we came into this era of AI, all of the work that I did on setting out what a brand's marketing, verbal and visual guidelines should have within them became so much more powerful because when that's in place and you give that to AI and you create a brand brain, you are able to execute across all channels so much faster. So the AI John Readman: Yeah, yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: area of the business, we've been building brand brains. Which is essentially in short, like a skills file or a document architecture that powers John Readman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: a brain for every single business that we run. And the brain contains vision, mission, values, value proposition, tone of voice, but the tone of voice is like 35 pages. Examples, not this, this, these phrases, not these, these emojis, not these. Comprehensive. John Readman: So it's a comprehensive, detailed document, not just one prompt go, do, yeah, And I think that's often where people go wrong. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Totally. So you layer in yeah. John Readman: They just, they don't give the AI enough and then the AI, because of the way it's designed, goes and makes up the rest. And that's where Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah, I am John Readman: then people go, it doesn't work for me because it makes stuff up and I'm going, well, you've not given it enough information, so it doesn't. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: And everybody's using AI in open chat mode with a prompt. But the response, the possibility of responses in open chat mode with a prompt is everything the AI can reach. So when you work in a closed brand mode where you're using it within an environment like a specific project, and it can't go outside of that, and it can only reference what you've given it. Then we're starting to get some brand consistency, which was the problem that I John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: found when my team were like, let's use AI for everything. And then I was like, whoa, guys, stop. This is not gonna work because we need to make sure that we're doing these things to make sure that the brand cohesion doesn't we don't lose that and we still get the quality we need. So then within John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: within every brand's brain, they have every single SKU they sell and a tone of voice for how that's being sold. what phrases they're using, how we translate into human language. So when that stuff exists in the back end, of course it can generate ad copy. Of course it can run email campaigns and generate email campaigns, because it has so much data around what it is you're trying to build and who you're trying to build it for. John Readman: Yeah, well, that's cool. I've got some brands who might like to have a play with that. That sounds fantastic. Yeah, that is it. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. Yeah. It's called we it's basically what we're doing across Fireball AI is building brains for brands so that they can use AI to execute. John Readman: Yeah, that's super good. I think that's the right way to be doing it that level of depth because a lot of people don't put the effort into writing the skills and they are just constantly re-asking the same chat. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yes. Do you know why? Because doing that work is so boring. I have built so many and every time I think, am I going to enjoy this more the next time? No, because it's boring as hell to really define a brand and to make and to get everything in a place that is truthful, the language is right. Like building 30 pages of tone of voice, that's not fun. Like it's not when you're looking at John Readman: But it's so important if you then think about what that can unlock in the future. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Isn't it? Well that's why I get excited about it, because I think this pain brings me the pleasure of the tool executing in two months time, you know? John Readman: Yeah, and watch your sort of go-to AI at the moment for all that sort of stuff. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: well, I mean John Readman: without giving too many secrets away. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: I'm mixed to be honest because ev like I feel like the whole world was open AI and then for some reason everybody went anti open AI and went onto Claude. But there's so much good functionality in the new app for open AI on the desktop where they've got like the work section where you've got codecs and chat similar to what you have with with Claude is blowing John Readman: Coworking. dear. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: my mind. The way it can execute within that environment is is unbelievable. So I don't really have a favorite, but it is between Claude and OpenAI. John Readman: your view on using AI to build and create creative? Because some people, there's like lots of different camps on all of this. And you deal with a lot of retailers, they will be spending a huge amount on photo shoots and model shots and product shots and in-situation stuff. We all know, we were talking about conversion rate optimization before we... the data tells you that having in-situation product shots has a better conversion than just on a white background, right? We Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. John Readman: know that, but not everybody can afford to do that. So what's your view, I suppose personally, and then as a business, what do you do to support clients on all of that? Mary-Anne | Firebelly: So I think so brands from my perspective, let's give an example of we run the marketing for a a brand that does like ath leisure, like yoga pants. Yeah. John Readman: You can mention the brand if you want, it's fine. If you want to big them up. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: they're called W-R-E. So they make fitness clothing. And our strategy for them. was originally when we first started working with them, they were doing a lot of content production, like going out, shooting products that was used across all areas of their marketing. And we said to them, look, for every collection, you don't need to shoot every colour anymore. AI can do that. You don't need to shoot every environment because AI can do that. We need to make sure that you've got a library of every single product shape on a model. And then AI can do everything else. And so I think brands will stop moving from doing monthly or how whatever their cadence is to just shooting once and then AI producing everything off the back of that. AI can do stuff from scratch, like it can you you can say, okay, we're gonna launch this and we're gonna put this model into it. But I think the brand having at least one library of everything every collection. Is giving the visual part of AI a brain, right? This is what the totally. John Readman: Well, I think, yeah, it's giving that consistency again, because otherwise you just get a little bit of hallucination and it evolves and you end up with something Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. John Readman: that doesn't look anything like where you started from. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: But do I think AI can produce video and photo for e-commerce brands at scale? Yes. It's doing it right now for us. Like we have been able to Yeah. John Readman: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I completely agree. Yeah, yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: And it's only going to get better. Like Google's latest I.O. conference, they obviously released loads of updates to what they were doing across video photo. And I think Google's announcements can be a little bit complicated for people that aren't in the industry because From my understanding and experience of how Google operates, is they come up with an amazing idea, they run that amazing idea through Google Labs, which then creates a domain or a website that fulfills that objective. Then once they've proven that it works, they then bake it into a product that already exists. So, like Veo or whatever comes down the line. So that makes it quite complicated because people are like, do I use? the Google AI studio or do I use VO or do you use Nano Banana and where do I go and start to create this? Like it gets a little bit complicated. But the things that are coming down the line and even what's available to be done right now is mind blowing. So I do think that especially brands that are tight with budgets can do so, so much more. John Readman: And I think the interesting thing is it's going to enable some of the smaller, because this whole podcast is about scaling, right? So if you're a small to medium size, ambitious Shopify brand, your blockers to scaling in the past have suddenly gone away, right? So Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Gone. Hopefully. John Readman: the only thing is your ability. to try, learn and then implement and execute on all of this. And Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. John Readman: yeah, there's probably either they need to speak to people like you or they need to have a play around building up their own knowledge to be able to do all of this because it's giving everybody access to, yeah, you can put your product on a model on a beach without having to go to the beach and it looks completely authentic and it will improve your conversion rate. And you can... Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Totally. I'll give yeah, I'll give your your audience a bit of a a a secret weapon here when it comes to AI images on site for Shopify. So there's an app called Tolstoy, which is without a doubt the best right now. So it connects to your catalogue and your product inventory. And within the back end of Tolstoy, you create T O L John Readman: How do you spell Tolstoy? Just so everybody can, we'll put it in the show notes as well. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah, T-O-L-S-T-O-Y. people might know them because they started with like shoppable videos that so when you post a video on social, you then put that onto your website and it becomes a shoppable asset. So then people can shop directly from the UGC video on site, but you also get the data of which videos are selling the most on site, which is obviously s gold. exactly. John Readman: Super cool, yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: So what and what they did was they've they've The back end of Tolstoy connects with lots of different AI models. And then they've built a creative studio where they've basically done all the work on the complex prompting. So you can take your, let's say for instance, this yoga brand that does leggings, you can take that that shop. It knows all of the products that exist, and you can literally just click a template that they've got loads of. And it creates amazing content that you can just put straight into your product pages. and they've created a back-end section, which means that you can set up avatars which visually create models that then are consistently used across your site. So you create fake models. Totally. Yeah, so then you create, John Readman: Yeah, because that's the other, yeah, it's the same person. So you've got almost like your version of your people. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: yeah, so then I would go, okay, who are our avatars? Let's visualize and make them into a proper person a proper AI person. And then that person can be used across all the visuals on site for those specific avatars. So it John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: that just blows my mind what's available now. Cause that would have been, you know, scoping out a shoot. John Readman: Yeah, no, that's it. I need to get them on the podcast. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: You you really do. John Readman: whilst we're on apps, what other sort of, when you're doing a recommendation and doing a migration or build for a client, what are the other go-to apps that are in the FireBelly sort of tech stack? What do you always recommend? Mary-Anne | Firebelly: we use a mix across different clients, but we have a few favorites. We like lifetimely. is quite easy John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: for looking at lifetime value for clients. order bump we use quite frequently, which is for increasing average order value. Skio for subscriptions, we tend to use. Yeah, Tolstoy is a big one. Akendo, we like for reviews. So we tend to have this like list of subscriptions or apps that we like the most and we love working within. and actually because of the types of brands that we work with, a lot of the time we're speaking directly with the founders or producers of these apps to develop certain parts within them that we need for certain stores. We do this a lot for John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: for ColourWow because we have a lot of like different tests and things that we want to run and integrate with. so that means that we end up being able to kind of customize some of these apps in a way because we reach out to the developers and we're like, Yo, we have a big store and we want this app to do this. Can you guys build it? And they're obviously like, Yeah, sure, you know? So John Readman: It's quite interesting, the evolution of what our app now does, 90 % of the product roadmap has come from partners and clients going, well, could it do this? I'm like, yeah, why have we never thought of that before? Because we're not, we're sort of. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Like yeah, in the weeds a bit. John Readman: Yeah, you almost need to eat your own dog food more. And I do a lot of just talking to our customers and they join Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. John Readman: and talk to our e-commerce partners and they join like we've created this new like product forum so they can come and go, right, what if I know you've got the data? Why can't you also do this bit or do that bit? Our big thing is we want to take all your Shopify inventory product and everything, discounts and margin, and connect that to your advertising spend to work out actually what are we actually making a profit on from our advertising, right? So that's like in a nutshell, but then someone goes, yeah, but that's the name of the campaign. I want to see the actual campaign image. And I want to see that in my dashboard. And I want to know which ad sold which pairs of leggings, for instance. and how much money do we make on those? And I want to say all, and then I want to ask it questions and follow up questions. And then that can inform what creative, because actually you might not be able to identify, if you're the CEO and you're looking or asking Bosco a question, you won't know the campaign name and what image is associated with that. if you see the image, you go, makes sense. We need more stuff like that. yeah, Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Totally. Yeah. John Readman: So you've been on lots of journeys with lots of different brands. What other advice have you got to medium to large sized brands who are umming and ahhing about moving to Shopify? some people's perception is Shopify is just for smaller brands Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah. John Readman: What advice have you got for medium to large scale people thinking about migrating over from, I don't know, Salesforce or Magento to Shopify? Mary-Anne | Firebelly: I would say don't all are like just do it because you know, if you took something that we're talking about, ColorWow, for instance, they scaled hugely with Shopify. And the reason that their business grew so much was they grew an absolute weapon of TikTok affiliates that would go out and communicate about their brand. I think they've got 8,000 TikTok affiliates. That produce content for them on a daily basis, which drives a lot of their revenue. The connection between Shopify and TikTok, TikTok Shop, is relatively straightforward because they have Shopify. The challenge John Readman: Yeah, yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: that we're having now, because L'Oreal operates from Salesforce e-commerce for all of their brands, there's a migration going back to put Shopify back into Salesforce e-commerce cloud. The challenge John Readman: No. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: is That some of the things that have enabled Color Wow to scale at such a rapid pace have been because of the simplicity of how it was set up. So we see this all the time because when we actually do audits of competitor landscape, we did one just a few weeks ago again, looking at Juice, this mobile the mobile accessories brand. What's the market look like? They've got two big players, they've got Anchor. And they've got Belkin. Anchor are on Shopify. They're absolutely at the top of their game. They're on all channels. They're able to execute across all channels effectively. Belkin are on Salesforce e-commerce cloud. Now, Belkin are not active on TikTok or TikTok shop or TikTok affiliates. And that is because the back-end structure of setting that up is an absolute ball ache. And I'm sure that that is why they're not visible there. And so being John Readman: That's it. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: on Shopify enables you to launch into all of these new areas where attention is very, cheap. So you're able to run these tests, launch these new channels in a way that you just can't do from the other platforms in my opinion. John Readman: Well, and I think people often forget Shopify's five and a half thousand developers have solved half the problems for you. So that then if you do want to sell your products in an agentic way in the future in open AI, it will just be there, right? It Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Totally. Totally. John Readman: will just be there. You don't need to build a connector. You don't need to do anything. Your product will just appear. Because Shopify's business model is geared up the more successful you are, the more successful they are. So they're almost like a small shareholder in your business and they're incentivized for you to be successful. So, yeah, so I'm conscious. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Massively. Yeah. Yeah. And I just think what we've seen from Shopify, what we've seen Shopify launch over the last, you know, just over the last year tells me that like they're on it. They're absolutely on it. John Readman: Yeah. Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Those five thousand developers are working their ass off right now. John Readman: Yeah, I think I saw most of the conference last week There was this sort of partner conference on one side of the road and then the other side of it was their whole company conference. And then on the last evening, they had a block party with those eight thousand people all together. was it was it was crazy. But Mary-Anne | Firebelly: That's so fun. John Readman: Thank you. This has been fantastic. We could talk for hours, Mary-Anne | Firebelly: I know. John Readman: people want to find you or FireBelly, how do they get in touch with you? How do they contact you? what should they do? Mary-Anne | Firebelly: Yeah, the easiest way is Marianne Damazzo, on socials. Same handle everywhere. D A A R Z O is the surname. yeah, and they can DM me, message me, whatever they want really.