Latest / Talk Commerce / Unraveling the Future with Fabric: The Composable Commerce Revolution with Mike Micucci
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:01.226) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Mike Micucci from Fabric Commerce. And we practiced the name, and I'm just terrible at it. So Mike, go ahead, do an introduction. Tell us your day -to -day role and maybe one of your passions in life. Scott (00:06.375) you Mike Micucci (00:07.478) You nailed it Brent. Mike Micucci (00:16.822) Yeah. Mike Micucci (00:21.464) Well, thank you, Brent. It's great to see you again. We met in Palm Springs at e -tail and just really looking forward to this opportunity to have in this chat. Mike Micucci, I'm the CEO of Fabric Commerce. We're an e -commerce platform company. Been here about six months, run the company and been in and out of the e -comm world for many, many, many years, forming a long time Salesforce executive, CEO of Commerce Cloud and a few other platforms prior to that. So this is, it's been. Scott (00:47.815) you Mike Micucci (00:51.342) a ton of fun and looking forward to this chat. Scott (00:54.713) you Brent Peterson (00:57.866) Before we get into content, you have volunteered to be part of the free joke project. So all I'm going to do is tell you a joke. And all you have to do is say, should this joke be free? Or do you think at some point we should pay for it? Or is this an open source joke? Or is this a closed joke like? Anyways, so here we go. I've just invented the first thought -controlled air freshener. Mike Micucci (01:20.302) That's a good one. There you go. Mike Micucci (01:32.372) Oh jeez, that's terrible. I think that joke needs to be free. Hands down. I don't think we can pay for that one. That one, that one, that one, that one, check the sense box, yes. Brent Peterson (01:35.466) Yeah. Scott (01:37.209) you Brent Peterson (01:38.314) Yeah. I worked hard to find a terrible joke. So. Brent Peterson (01:49.354) There you go. All right, let's talk about Fabric Commerce. Give us a little bit of background on it. Tell us maybe a little bit how it got started and maybe one of your ICPs on that. Mike Micucci (02:02.958) Yeah, great. So Fabric, it's about six years old. A company was founded by some former sales, not sales, Amazon executives, really engineers who spent a better part of a decade building out the underpinnings of the Amazon shopping experience that we know and love every day. And somewhere along the line, after they kind of perfected the technology, they kind of had said, why can't every company have the same power? Scott (02:19.641) you Mike Micucci (02:32.494) same flexibility, this technology that we put in place that allows Amazon to power that unbelievable shopping experience. And that led them to form Fabric. They started building this platform. And of course, we all know what happened. COVID hits and it was like, boom, things were kind of crazy. The company grew really, really fast. We tracked a good chunk of funding and that led us to be... the luxury of building a platform or form approach to e -commerce. Rethink how you would build an e -commerce platform. Fast forward today and we have a comprehensive composable platform that lets you build all the way from merchandising, how people shop, all the way through to order fulfillment and handling the order management side. So one platform, the complete lifecycle. As I always say, commerce doesn't stop at checkout, it's just getting started. Scott (03:02.183) you Brent Peterson (03:19.37) you Mike Micucci (03:30.158) So RACP straight up is Omni Channel retailers. That's where we excel, particularly where things get complex, where you have to deliver experiences across both physical and digital, maybe customer service, social. Our platform allows you to do that seamlessly. Scott (03:35.175) you Mike Micucci (03:53.358) Brent, no, I think our bandwidth is a little constrained. I'm not sure if it's me or you, just FYI, in case there's a delay. Brent Peterson (04:01.162) Yeah, I'm going to put it on low data mode. We'll edit that little bit out. It does record in each of our browsers, but I'll put it on low data mode. We might not see each other's face, but it'll help with that delay. Mike Micucci (04:07.008) you Brent Peterson (04:18.314) Alright, here we go. So you mentioned composable. I know that composable commerce has been kind of a buzzword in the last couple years. Explain a little bit about how composable fits in with fabric. Scott (04:21.415) you Scott (04:31.143) you Mike Micucci (04:34.222) Yeah, this is how I think about it. I think it's a great point to clarify. You know, if you think through the lens of e -commerce over the probably the last probably two decades, there's really two kind of ways to approach this. And the prevalent way is kind of the app approach where you hit the entire app built together. And, you know, I think Shopify is a great one where it's pretty much a turnkey solution. You have a store, you have components on that store, and then you have the ability to configure that. And it's... really simple to get going and get started. And that's kind of the all in one solution. And there's different variations of that from Salesforce all the way through to Shopify. Composable came out of the idea that, you know, there's a lot of businesses out there where they need to be, go way beyond that template and they need much more flexibility there. Maybe they have different complexity needs in their product mix, maybe just the way the business demands or even how. differentiate themselves. So how can you get the same power of a unified platform for commerce or merchandising to fulfillment, yet the flexibility to build the experience you want. Given the rise of Composable allows you to use whatever head you want and then put the commerce services into that head. You want your experience to show up, but still have the full kind of benefits of the backend to manage the full commerce life cycle. And that commerce life cycle is how you configure your products, how you configure your promotion, your pricing, manage your inventory, fulfill your orders, and returns. And so the backend provides that workspace and the front end is freed up to build whatever experience you want against the set of APIs or applications the platform provides. Brent Peterson (06:30.986) In the omni -channel experience, a general retailer would have to put a bunch of things together to maybe talk a little bit about how fabric will help in that process of getting omni -channel together and what it means to the bottom line for that merchant. Mike Micucci (06:46.452) Yeah, Brent, that's probably the big question for a retailer and approaching on Mutantile Commerce through a composable is like, okay, how do I do this? How do I get started? Because it can be daunting. I'd say I kind of put it on spectrum. There's two lenses to this. The first is you might have experiences that you're pretty happy with. Maybe your digital store is great or your in -store app is working well, but you're struggling maybe on real -time inventory or managing your promotions better. The first approach, which is pretty common, is kind of like this is how we can get started, is Fabric can provide just those discrete services. So you can weave in our... into your existing store or head as we call it, the app, and provide real -time inventory capabilities. Or maybe you want to offer different offers or promotions capabilities. So kind of like incrementally address some of the business challenges you have and how you want to show up with the customer. If you want to go and you need to pull the bandaid and put a whole new experience in place, the next step is thinking through the lens of how to take that platform and start and build that experience. And the great thing is there's a number of great templates out there, like things like for cell provides and so forth, that you can jumpstart your experience building. What Fabric has done, it's two things. One is while we have a whole suite of APIs, it takes tremendous expertise to orchestrate those APIs into an experience, right? There's over 500 APIs on our platform. Checkout alone, it probably touches just about every combination of API from product price, inventory, to your payment, to your shipping, and understanding the business logic to orchestrate those. So what Fabric did is we kind of built one layer on top of that. We call them primitives, but think of those as mini apps that you can then use in combination with your template to kind of de -risk this and reduce the cost of implementation and gain. Brent Peterson (08:58.57) you Mike Micucci (09:08.814) faster, and those are available for your developers to jumpstart the whole process. So we kind of provide incremental service ability, like you can take a piece, go all the way full and develop a full new experience, but kind of go beyond just the API layer. This helps you get to market faster, de -risk this, and ultimately take some of the complexity out of the whole equation. Brent Peterson (09:08.956) you Brent Peterson (09:34.602) Mike, I've been doing a little research on Fabric and I was reading about it. You had mentioned infrastructure trying to get these complexities together. You have this ethos, boost what's there, make it better and faster. Can you explain what that means and how that could improve the investment you have and how that maybe it would help in your infrastructure connecting those APIs and things like that? Mike Micucci (10:03.854) Yeah. First, Brian, I'm glad when you did your research, you didn't tell me we were a clothing company. So first step, big first step. Um, look, as I mentioned before, how do we take the risk out of this? There's, there's one I talked about incrementally using our services, kind of adopt a service at a time. We just finished a great project with a brand where they just used our product catalog service. There are. They're supporting a little over 5 million SKUs and they use this with their existing storefront experience. Why did they use Fabric? One, our ability to deliver the product information at lightning fast speeds. We know speed equals conversion. Two, the flexibility of managing in the backend. And three, it was all about how we could take that one kind of experience from the product catalog, but there is another set of services. that when they're ready, they can layer on top of them. So it's not a one and done. And that helps de -risk that piece. But the other area is we are partnering with different agencies and system integrators to package up the expertise that we've had in delivering other brands. And we're announcing at Shop Talk, the Bounteous Composable Commerce Accelerator using the Fabric Platform. And we just completed a big project with Bounteous, deployed a major retailer. Scott (11:13.255) you Mike Micucci (11:29.006) and we took those learnings, packaged those up into this accelerator, and you jump start the next set of OmniNail retailers. So check it out at Shop Talk. It's going to be pretty cool. Scott (11:31.257) you Brent Peterson (11:41.578) That's awesome. One of the things everybody talks about is AI right now. There's a huge push in AI, especially in generative AI, but I think that in the back end, in the infrastructure part, and especially in data analytics and things like that, that's what's really changing how e -commerce works. Talk about what Fabric is doing in terms of... how AI is getting integrated and what things you're working on and where you see it going in the future. Mike Micucci (12:16.43) So Brent, here's how I think a little bit about AI. AI is going to literally change every aspect of our lives, both from the consumer aspect, but also through the lens of all the applications that we're building or the way you experience those applications. In the past, AI was mostly around swinging recommendations out to people and hoping they would, you know, click on those. But this is going to fundamentally, is fundamentally changing. And I'll think of through the lens of commerce and a couple of ways. We're all probably at this point, very familiar with, you know, things like chat, TBT and large language models and how the generative piece, and that's going to help quite a bit. And you know, everything from how. Scott (12:58.823) you Mike Micucci (13:08.302) Your descriptions are written, the content's written and so forth and commerce platforms and Fabric's no different. We're adopting those so that you can leverage that tech, particularly around your product information and normalize that, up -level it, tailor it to your audience. And it's going to be exciting. But I think the breakthrough on AI is going to actually come just as you mentioned more from an operator perspective. Scott (13:26.457) you Mike Micucci (13:33.934) the complexity of managing and stacking things like promotions or how you manage order fulfillment, how you get insights from those to react in real time to pricing changes. So that's where you're going to see the big innovation is for how AI takes the data from the commerce platform, from how we look at merchandising, how your consumers are interacting with your products, all the way through fulfillment and returns, combining that to drive really fast changes. Brent Peterson (13:52.412) you Scott (13:53.927) you Mike Micucci (14:03.774) inside the op for the operators to adjust pricing, to adjust their order fulfillment logic and react in real time, to adjust their inventory. This has always happened through a complex set of interfaces and UIs where operators literally are constantly adjusting through the UI to where now AI will be there to guide them, suggest and help them react much faster with much more data. This is going to profoundly change the experience. You're going to offer a better experience to your consumers. You're going to make sure the products are available to where you need them. You'll be able to shop your entire inventory, whether store, drop ship, wholesale. AI is going to be a huge unlock for monetizing. I think what was really the dream of e -commerce to now becoming much more accessible because of availability data and be able to make decisions lightning fast. This is a whole new step for us in the industry. So it's gonna rush around huge changes. Brent Peterson (15:11.466) I like what you said earlier about it's more machine learning, but I think a lot of these platforms have had this, hey, here's some suggested products. And that's kind of the old, not the old school, but that, in a sense, it's machine learning. It's learning about how the customer is behaving. Do you see it now going also towards? maybe A -B testing, even live A -B testing, and giving some of that to the machine learning engine or the AI engine that says, hey, let's try these two different products and see where they behave and how customers react to them. And then in the future, we'll start promoting these different products in ways so customers see them more. Mike Micucci (15:56.238) I was thinking about it this way, Brent. I would just think it maybe even past A .B. testing. Okay. You think that when you shop on Amazon, I'm sure you've seen this, particularly during holidays, do you think they're on lockdown on changes? No. I mean, literally they're adjusting prices and changes dynamically all through the holidays, reacting to the changes they're seeing in the market, the consumer. what they're adopting to, what they're searching on and so forth. Right. traditional kind of e -comm in the retail world. Um, particularly when I was on Salesforce commerce cloud, I mean, companies locked down their systems in September. They were in hard freeze. They might change a little bit of the data and so forth, but their ability to make changes basically stopped, you know, two months before the holiday. Right. So usher in AI. Brent Peterson (16:41.148) you Mike Micucci (16:52.782) Why can't every company have that same power Amazon has to react in near real time? What do you need? You need machine learning and AI to make those decisions, make those recommendations. So that is literally happening when you're in the midst of the shopping. So that's the change. So I would go beyond A -B testing because a lot of that can happen in near real time on machine learning. And it's now giving the operator. this just unbelievable power to react to consumer change in the market to drive maximum results. This is what I mean by kind of the big unlock. This was only accessible to the biggest companies who had made these platform investments. But now we can make every company kind of get that same experience. And this is what AI and machine learning are going to usher in. And I just add, you can't do this unless you have a platform underneath with this the near instantaneous API speed to deliver this information when it changes, but also can auto scale up and down based on demand. So you kind of need both the intelligence side and a platform that can react with the performance and speed that you would expect from modern platforms. And that's what gets me so excited about Fabric. Brent Peterson (18:14.058) We started off the conversation with sort of omni -channel. approach. There is now a more of a meeting of minds between physical stores and digital stores. Where do you see in this next year, even the next two years now, for the merging of that digital slash physical experience for clients? Scott (18:28.647) you Mike Micucci (18:34.496) you Mike Micucci (18:40.814) Yeah. So COVID taught us a lot, right? And it forced, I would just say it forced a lot of things in the digital front where suddenly it became the only channel. I mean, consumers, you know, whether you believe it or not, they have probably already shopped your store and your offerings digitally before they even showed up at the store. They're probably doing it while they're in the store. they might check something out at the store and go back home and buy it and pivot back and pick it up in the store. This handoff between your digital experience and your physical experience needs to be completely seamless. Although if it's not, you're really missing out to where the consumer wants to be. That's the experience they want. And it should really not be something that's bifurcated. It should be seamless. And that's what's so exciting about, again, these composable platforms. is a unleash or just remove the shackles that were holding it back. And now you can blend those experiences. And I brought this up, like most composable platforms were built really for the merchandising experience. Like, hey, we can build a really cool digital store to help you merchandise your products and your price and so forth and offers. But then they completely stopped the checkout. Like, okay, checkout done, hands off. Scott (19:57.607) you Mike Micucci (20:08.27) And we hand it off to a point of sale system inside of the store that's 25 years old. This is where fabric shines because it doesn't stop at checkout. We have the complete order life cycle right there. So now you can shop the store. You can pick up from store, ship from store, return to store. We blend that experience together. You can only do that if you have a seamless journey between shopping and orders. So you can ladder those on top of each other. You can offer promotions, appeasements where you need to, where it's not three different systems that aren't connected. So now the consumer journey is seamless. It's great. And that helps build your loyalty, improve your conversion. And we rolled the full stack out recently for a customer during holiday. We replaced a number of legacy techs we're all familiar with. And what we saw... After the dust cleared from holiday and we got through a couple quarters, we were seeing on average over 30 % increase in conversion against their legacy tech stack year over year. And that really impacted the bottom line. And we think that's what modern technology can do. Brent Peterson (21:22.666) Last question or comment on this, this whole digital experience, there's another buzzword called client telling, where the salesperson at the register, at the POS, is now helping the client to sell more or to purchase more products from the online experience. Mike Micucci (21:33.742) you Mike Micucci (21:38.9) Thank you. Mike Micucci (21:45.454) Well, here's how I look at that client telling is, Brent, I didn't hear the last part of the question, but I want to guess what you were getting to is where do we see client telling fit into kind of composable? Client telling has been something that's been approached and asked about for me for the last decade. Brent Peterson (21:46.004) What would you say to a merchant now that they've kind of integrated everything together? Mike Micucci (22:13.87) Um, it's been challenging for the retailers to build that because the underlying tech stacks did not have the services, API services and a unified data layer to allow them to build the in -store experiences. Again, back to a modern commerce platform. That's exactly what you would expect. Right. So you can build a client telling experience against these, the backend, the composable surface area. that dovetails and ties directly into the digital experience, ties into your customer service experience, but it's all using the same set of services, the same checkout, the same customer information, same promo information. So again, from a consumer perspective, it's a seamless journey. We think client telling is an important unlock. Again, having the API surface area to do that is one of the benefits of a composable platform. Brent Peterson (23:11.754) That's perfect. Mike, are you going to be at Shop Talk this year and are people going to learn more about fabric there? Mike Micucci (23:19.734) Fabric will be front and center at Shop Talk. We are going to be there with our partners Bounteous and showing off the new accelerator. We have a great party at Shop Talk. It's a throwback party to the 80s. The team is beyond excited about it. We throw a great party. And so Fabric will be there in spirit or in full tilt. I believe it or not, had a long -term commitment and I will not be there, but I'll be there in spirit. Brent Peterson (23:47.874) That's awesome. I am going to do my best to get this episode out before shop talk I will be at shop talk and I would encourage everybody to to look up fabric at the event and and of course as we go forward I'll make sure that we get these into the your contact details in the show notes Mike as I close out the podcast I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today? Mike Micucci (24:13.55) Well, hey, first Brent, thank you so much for making time and inviting me to your podcast. I would just say, Hey, come and check out Fabric at Shop Talk. It's going to be a lot of fun with Bounteous. Our party is Sunday, March 17th at seven o 'clock at the retro. And the team is going to be there. Of course we have a booth. We just brought on a new evangelist and she's our lead strategy. His name is Jay Topper. He was formerly the chief digital officer at Chico's and he can really explain kind of the ins and outs of deploying a composable solution at scale. So we are there and I hope you check out Fabric. Brent Peterson (24:56.362) That's great. Mike Micucci, the CEO of Fabric. Thank you so much for being here today. Have a great day. Mike Micucci (25:00.588) Makuchi, yes, you nailed it. Mike Micucci (25:08.834) Thank you.