What happens to eCommerce after a year as this one has been? It is a safe bet that it will continue to grow as the pandemic lingers. But how many of the shifts we saw in 2020 will create permanent changes? And what are brands planning after weathering this storm?
We recently had the chance to chat with Brian Rainey, CEO of gooten.com, to get some insights.
On-Demand Fulfilment with Gooten’s Brian Rainey
Good afternoon. We are here with Brian Rainey, the CEO of “Gooten.” They are an on-demand supply chain platform. Brian, welcome. What’s going on?
Thanks, Mike. Not too much. I’m just starting to get ready for the holiday season on November 17th. This is going to be a holiday like no other, I think. So, we are ramping up for a huge acceleration of orders, but other than that, it’s just another day in a fast-growing fa industry.
So, I’m guessing you alluded that this season might be slightly different because of Covid. What’s going on?
Yeah. That certainly is a piece of it. But, it turns out that when you double the number of e-commerce orders, the shipping and logistics supply chain can’t exactly double in size overnight. So, we’re facing a lot of different things, kind of all at once. You’ve got an enormous shift towards online ordering. You have unprecedented volumes going through your major shipping houses: UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL. You’ve got more and more people who will shift from experiential gifts for the first time in a long time, which has been the trend for travel and services, to physical gifts and goods. So, even within that shift, there’s a huge jump up. So, it’s kind of all of these things all at once where trend lines for a long time had been effectively linear, and then, almost overnight, they shift towards e-commerce sales; looks like a vertical line and, so, flexible supply chain solutions has become the name of the game. And finding complementary ways to continue delivering on behalf of the end customer expectation is what many online merchants need to figure out very quickly.
And are we seeing this as a result of their moving to online shopping because they can’t go to their local shops? Are they doing it because it’s safer, convenient, a little bit of all the above?
I think it’s all of the above. One of the things that I think people are wondering is what happens after the pandemic. What goes back to normal? And I think really what we’re seeing is not necessarily a change from what “was” to what “is.” We’ve seen an acceleration of a change that was already happening.
You had predictions that by the end of 2021, online commerce would represent 17% of the overall economic activity. In Q2, it was 24%, so that you would see this linear growth. So, what is happening is trends that were already taking place online. Commerce works from home, and technology enables communication in very different ways. The pandemic has just accelerated a lot of those.
So, where you’re right, in some cases where you would have gone down to the local store to pick something up, the value and convenience of getting that shipped directly to the home is something that we don’t see going away. But, at the same time, what technology and what kind of changes in the way we deliver items have brought over the past five years, you have a lot of people finding a much better and more personalized opportunity to get something that’s much more directed towards them, rather than going to a big-box retailer and buying one of a hundred thousand SKUs that they can carry. So, convenience availability and, I think, breadth of choice is what technology and online commerce can enable for consumers.
And how does this shift online? Can local businesses survive this? And can they take advantage of this? What happens with a local business?
Yeah. Local business is a tough part of this; we recognize that in the restaurant industry. I’m based in New York City, and the change in what this is going to do to the restaurant industry is going to be significant, but, as I said, it’s been a trend the restaurant industry had to figure out: new ways to deliver on behalf of their end customer. And, as we see more and more people dining at home and wanting that dining-at-home experience, you’re seeing local restaurants having to figure out how to deliver. How to do delivery work to satisfy their end customer in the same way local and online businesses have a footprint already around last-mile logistics. That’s the most difficult part of the supply chain: ensuring you can get something that is the last mile from a distribution center to the home.
You’re going to see a greater and greater shift of local businesses enabling online commerce but creating the ability to come in the store to pick an item up. You see that with a lot of big-box retailers. Expect to see technology enablement to where the idea of bricks and clicks, which I think you’ve heard before out of Web 1.0, is this idea of: “How do you compliment an online store presence with an offline in-person kind of ability to shop?” You’re going to see that moving down into local businesses. In many ways, technology will enable local businesses to start competing online, where they didn’t previously have as good of a presence. So, you’re going to start to be able to say it’s not just Amazon online.
Now, I can shop locally even though I’m online. One of the interesting announcements I heard in the last day or so is that Uber is moving into the “we can deliver anything in 30 minutes.” And that begins to talk about the last mile in the supply chain where Uber is looking to move people, inventory, and products.
If you look at Uber’s strategy, especially since the pandemic began, they let go of tangential businesses. They’re selling off their Uber freight business. They’re moving their advanced technology and self-driving group. They’re looking to explore a sale there while doubling down on moving people and delivery. They are buying Postmates to expand that reach effectively. Their entire business has been supported over the past two quarters by local deliveries and, I think, in that same way, that idea of local merchants being complemented by these national delivery mechanisms of last-mile delivery, whether it be your DoorDash or Postmates or TaskRabbit or whatever, the next technology is going to be that they can look to outsource the things that you’re not great at. Uber is very good at moving people and packages a short distance, with the local touch and local community flavor that a local merchant provides.
And what does that do with the concept of free shipping? Because Uber’s not going to do this for free. One of the challenges I’ve always had is these delivery services for meals: you end up with 30 hamburgers a second meal, and you’re paying for a second meal.
That’s exactly right. They can deliver, and, yes, they can manage the last mile, but at what cost? Because we’ve always been taught a lot about the retail business, like free shipping, right? So, what does that mean? Shipping isn’t free, though, right? And I think that’s what the consumer gets conditioned, right? We talk to our merchant partners on the Gooten platform and utilize the Gooten supply chain to think of shipping as a product because that’s what it is. When you buy an item to get it to the customer, you’re buying the product and effectively buying shipping. Now, the consumer is conditioned to free shipping. Then, you utilize “shipping the product” as an inducement to drive the customer towards where you’re trying to drive them to, typically providing free shipping or subsidizing the shipping cost at 110 or 115 percent of your average cart value. They have to add one more incremental product, but these local delivery services are shifting consumer expectations, which I’ll admit I’m surprised about because I’m like you; I always expect free shipping.
There is a cost in getting that item to the end customer, to the door, so what is the value of that convenience? What we see now is Postmates, DoorDash, and Instacart, and these delivery services are now putting a real economic price on the convenience of home delivery. And while that is the current situation, where you don’t have other options, safely go out and shop. When we’re truly back to normal, you will see a solidification. I think of the value of the delivery of that convenience, that time, that speed, while simultaneously recognizing that Walmart, for example, will start turning more and more of their real estate space into pickup and drop-off centers.
So that the customer can effectively do last-mile delivery, they take the in-store experience and the time of shopping out, which is a major convenience. Still, they don’t have to set up complicated logistics networks. So, I think you’ll see that more and more businesses and storefronts effectively act as hybrid logistics centers to get things to the end customer.
Yeah. I had heard that that’s sort of the primary direction that most empty malls are going towards, turning them into fulfillment centers. So you’re going to do that more and more.
Yep. That’s exactly right. You’ve got space. You’ve got it local and have the majority of the way. A mall is laid out; if you think about it, it lends itself to anchor warehouses. For major, big-box retailers to have last-mile delivery customer pickup while having smaller storefronts that can act almost as we work for fulfillment. There’s also a major difference in the cost of shipping to a distribution center versus the cost of the last mile. That’s why it is so difficult. And finding that sort of hybrid solution that allows the customer to take part in that, to add onto an existing trip where they pass them. All malls are in places that sprang up out of nowhere. White malls are central to our communities, so I think trips to malls are now going to come back, but it’s going to be one of picking something up rather than going and discovering and finding something.
And do you think that when we return to whatever normal I – I don’t know what or whatever you want to call it – will be primarily like flagship stores where you might go and see and touch? Still, you will buy online for the most part, so we will move to more flagship stores and less direct retail.
I think you have to look at what the consumer wants. That’s what’s coming out of this, right? And simultaneously, Amazon, the largest individual retailer, is moving offline as people are moving online. They bought whole foods. They are opening their four-star stores. So, there will always be an experiential experience to feel touch and a tangential experience to shopping. So, this is not a one-size-fits-all model. We will be seeing hybrid applications of different technologies, ways to shop, and ways to interact in-store and online where you can effectively.
If you’re a retailer, you must offer these complimentary services to touch the customer or your end consumer in the way and when they’re ready to purchase. So, you can’t negate the online ease, online shopping, and the ability to come in and pick something up. So, you have to think about how that hybrid solution works, and what we’re talking about is the customer experience and journey, right? So, what’s happening is that customers are expecting more and more from the different services. Again, that leads back to the idea of some personalized offerings that they’re not satisfied with simply buying one of an SKU. They want something that’s for them, that’s original.
So, how do we address this personalized demand that we’re seeing?
Yeah. This is where, I think, the Gooten business model in the on-demand supply chain comes in. There is a straight line from three major TV networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, to digital cable to a million YouTube channels people want to consume. What is personalized and what they connect to commerce is moving in the same way rather than selling. There’s no longer two; no fall and spring fashion season. H&M came out with 52 seas micro seasons yearly to have short runs. Well, that’s incredibly unsustainable. H&M has a massive inventory problem right now. So, you face this sustainability problem with the same issue: consumers want something personalized. How do I represent myself and my brand uniquely to my on-demand commerce, and getting the production decision as close to the end customer of the end customer’s purchase as soon as possible meets those two?
So, you lower or increase the sustainability by lowering the inventory needs and lowering pre-production costs while providing, through technology, hardware, and equipment advances, the ability to create something that is on par with, from a quality standpoint, what was previously had to be done in pre-production had to be user tested, had to be taken out so that you’re now giving the consumer something unique to them; whether that’s wall art or home décor or fashion or personalized gifts. So, again, this is going to be a compliment too. This is the ability for brands, content creators, and retailers to reach their customers in all the ways they want. This is not going to replace these core offerings fully. Instead, they will complement them in a way that allows brands to connect more deeply and closely with their end customer.
And I’m guessing that this is something that Gooten can help with.
This is exactly what Gooten does. We have back catalogs of, at times, millions of different pieces of content. There’s just no way to monetize that content sustainably. You can’t print a million different images and hope that they all sell at the same time. You can do online, though, to personalize the marketing journey to each person so that you are touching them, attracting them, and talking to them about where they shop, where they visit, and where they browse. You can also now personalize the content and the commerce itself as well. So, you can now offer me at the point of purchase something unique to me without having to carry that in inventory. That’s where on-demand complements traditional retail commerce while at the same time effectively democratizing the distribution. You no longer need a storefront in a mall. You no longer require employees. You no longer need inventory. You can set up through a marketplace like Etsy or an e-commerce enablement software like Big Commerce or Shopify. You can now set up a storefront effectively immediately. And what matters most is the ability to connect to the end customer. That’s where the Gooten on-demand supply chain allows merchants to set up the same way Amazon web services don’t. You’re no longer required to buy your server to run your website.
So, are you allowing them to do white labeling? Are you connecting them with the suppliers? How does that work?
Yeah. So, everything is white-labeled. We like to say that when our merchant partners utilize the Gooten network, their end customer expects, or experiences, something as if it were coming off a merchant’s shelf. We have a distributed network of 50 manufacturing partners with 90 locations globally. When an order comes into the Gooten network, we choose the optimal manufacturing partner based on product and location. So, shipping, producing, and shipping items to California from the West Coast save time. It saves money. It’s more sustainable that way. It lowers the underlying cost to ship that item. We talked about free shipping already.
One of the most important things is to be as close to the end customer as possible. So, we have a single connection to the Gooten on-demand network. We have hundreds of products that can immediately be spun up where there is no cost until a single item is sold. When we talk about going and working with brands with their supply chains that have been building this up for a long time, this is not necessarily to replace it. This complements it and extends the value of content because customers want an enormous amount of complementary products. If you’re not enabling those customers, you’re not creating that experience for an end customer to purchase and interact with a merchant how they want to. You’re either leaving money on the table, or you’ll lose that customer. That customer purchasing decision to somebody going to this platform integrates with the traditional e-commerce platforms, just like Shopify met. Yep.
We do shop Shopify, Woocommerce, and Etsy native out of the box. We’re doing a big commerce integration. We’re partnering with big commerce to do a strategic partnership that should be out in Q1 of 2021. We have the entire platform based on an API. So, you can utilize our API to integrate effectively into any platform needed to take advantage of the entire Gooten system and do personalization within our order management system. So, you can track orders from production to shipping to being delivered and create and personalize products within the order management system to deliver to each end customer.
Do you guys offer a full -eCommerce solution to a store? Or do they have to bring an e-commerce solution, and you do the fulfillment?
We believe very strongly that specialization provides a greater underlying kind of output. So, we partner with best-in-class e-commerce solutions. Big-commerce can do and focus on merchant needs from customer conversion, point of sale, and web layouts to do that better than we can. So, we partner and integrate with that to make the integration seamless. Our focus is on technology and supply chain enablement, so our manufacturing partners, for example, must manage people and space. They need to get an item through the manufacturing process into a box and onto a truck. That’s what they need to do.
We come in and partner with them from account management services technology and order integration tracking to create a better overall outcome; in the same way, the e-commerce platforms are constantly upgrading and integrating with a greater and greater sort of ecosystem of apps so that same level of merchant and storefront personalization. What makes sense for one merchant doesn’t necessarily make sense, for we come in with the most flexible enterprise-grade supply chain—a platform to complement the other services that will drive a brand forward.
And how do you deal with it? I mean, one of the advantages of non-on-demand is buying in bulk or volume discounts. So, how do you address that? And can you capture that through your platform so they can benefit from bulk buying?
Absolutely. Yeah. For certain customers, we can effectively capture orders. If they go over a threshold, if you sell 100 different units, our system will route that to a bulk manufacturing partner and cut those incremental costs between 15 and 25 percent. It gets lost because so much of the buying decision looks at the incremental unit cost instead of the all-in cost by holding no inventory. So you don’t have inventory carrying costs; you don’t have fulfillment costs, you don’t have networking capital tied up in fulfillment; you don’t have the amount of time to make sure that the incremental purchase between two thousand and five thousand units, for example, which can cut the cost by a greater ten percent means that you have to sell.
If you don’t sell 44,500 units, you’re losing money, even if you pay a higher unit price at the lower level, beyond sustainability and comparability. So, yes, our system can make bulk purchases, if that makes sense, but in a way that allows you to complement that. Where the long tail over a long period you’re not carrying; you’re not charging carrying costs; you’re not charging fulfillment costs; you’re not charging a second fulfillment fee after the item gets ordered. All of those costs have to be factored into that unit economic cost savings when you’re producing in bulk.
And what about if I find something I like through one of your partners? How do I know it’s going to be there in a month?
I a review on my website. They love it, and then I contact you, and you’re like, “Oh yeah, they don’t make that anymore. How do you deal with that?
We process 10 to 20,000 orders daily, constantly upgrading and monitoring our system. The other benefit of the Gooten manufacturing network is we have redundancy within our network. Before the global pandemic, I used to use the example of a snowstorm last holiday where we had three days to get items out before December 25th, or they would be late. And a snowstorm hit a factory outside in St. Louis and caused them to shut down. On these three days, we picked up 2,700 orders, moved them to North Carolina, and produced and shipped them, so they all arrived before December 25th. Redundancy and capacity are two sides of the same health. Santa is the ultimate logistics provider. He has a lot to teach the United States Postal Service this year. I know that they compare notes every year. Still, we’re constantly monitoring the health of our network and, by having the redundant capacity and by having redundant providers, manufacturing merchants who need an always-on 24 7 solution can be provided, rather than having single-party risk going directly to a manufacturer in case of those issues where it snows. Things get shut down, and packages have to get out.
Our average production time in our network is three days across nearly every single one of our products. And then shipping depends on the sort of shipping mode, and with a good allowance for 2020 issues that we’ve seen is around four days. So, the average delivery time from production to delivery is about a week across every one of our products. Now, that is not Amazon’s two-day purchase. So, some education is needed on why this personalized or customized opportunity will take slightly longer. But, still, as our network grows and our technology continues to improve, we’re cutting that time down through optimizations around our network size. And then, obviously, getting closer and closer to the end customer from a production and shipping standpoint. (???)
And how do you handle returns?
Returns. We generally don’t handle it. These are customized items, so there’s no ability to return them. Now, when you look at the level of returns and the cost of taking that inventory back in, putting it back onto a shelf, and picking that item out again. The actual return rate has to be greater than 50% to start making economic sense. What we do is, when there is an issue with a product, we try to make that as easy of a customer support opportunity as possible. We have a 94 customer satisfaction score because we use issues in the production and shipping process, whether a lost package or an item that doesn’t appear as expected. We use that to surprise and delight the customer and ensure the purchase decision goes right.
We talk to our merchant partners all the time. Half a percent of packages will get lost; that’s just the start you will have. And while that means 99.5 percent of your customers out of every 200 orders, 199 of them will get their item for that one customer; that is 100 of their lost packages. Our platform has a system with 27 support agents and 18-hour customer support daily. We want to ensure that we make it right by the end customer, which creates loyal customers because problems happen. That’s just happened as far as returns go. When we talk to our merchant partners, we build that into the cost of delivering your product. We’ve heard: “Hey, I ordered this for my boyfriend, and we broke up. I want to return this product.” It’s like, “Well, your I LOVE MY BOYFRIEND t-shirt isn’t going to be good for somebody else.” And, so, we talk about it as “what is that cost of customers.”
Is that relationship advice?
No. That’s way outside of my expertise. I handle e-commerce, not relationships. It’s where those two intersect that things get a little hairy for me, but no, that’s really how we think about it. What is the cost of customer delight? And we usually put it at some percentage of our margin to create loyal customers.
And what’s currently going on? What are your expectations of what you will work on in 2021?
There’s a lot. The holiday season always clarifies how much better we can be doing. But, look, we will continue to drive an enormous amount of value. We launched our Vim loyalty program for the on-demand, supply, and mass customization supply chain, a sort of industry. But first, we’re looking at driving incremental value back to our merchant partners in 2021 through our essential merchant program. That’s going to be incredibly important, as I already alluded to, adding additional supply to our network so that we get greater and greater localization from a production standpoint, expanding out our product catalog as more and more equipment and hardware is created so that more and more products can take advantage of the no inventory just-in-time mass personalization opportunity.
We will continue expanding our product catalog, ensuring the best of the on-demand supply chain. We want to drive mass adoption, so that will be more personalization around the package, the shipping label, and what goes in the box. When you think about e-commerce, the entire package effectively becomes the product. So that’s really where we’re going to be, driving a lot of incremental value in 2021 along with a much greater global expansion to ensure that the internet broadly doesn’t have borders.
Neither do your customers. A customer in Germany is just as likely to find your item on Instagram from San Francisco as a seller in Barcelona is going to be trying to sell something in New York, And so creating that kind of global network so that a single online solution can provide a globalized supply chain for products and customers worldwide.
That’s where we will be going into 2021 and beyond.
And for the most part, the consumer doesn’t even know you exist. So you’re sort of behind the scenes.
As long as we do our job right, that’s exactly right. The consumer doesn’t know we exist in the same way when you surf a website, and that website loads and Azure is hosting it for Microsoft. You don’t need to know that as long as that item arrives and it meets your expectations. The content is the value, whether the design, the label, the logo, or the picture. We want to deliver a high-quality product quickly and meet or exceed experiences on behalf of our merchant partners. They invest enormous amounts into their brand. Our supply chain solutions need to meet those investments that they’re investing in their brands to meet and exceed customer expectations to build a loyal, long-term customer relationship between merchant and their end customer.
And your merchants can bring their products to the platform, or do they have to buy from one of your partners?
Not currently. Our closed supply chain allows us to vet from a quality standpoint to a much greater degree. We want to bring your manufacturer into 2021 beyond utilizing the Gooten order management system. The transparency and the ability to run your business through a single order management system. Expect to see that into 2021 and beyond as we try to bring on-demand benefits to more industries.
As I said, on-demand commerce should complement what you’re already doing. Several businesses power 100% of their order volume through only the Gooten catalog. What we want to enable is where on-demand makes sense. You should utilize the Gooten platform where your network makes sense or have customized products. Think about an Etsy seller who does a large number of products themselves. For example, the artist would always do a hand-painted item, but a replica of that hand-painted item could easily be made through the Gooten manufacturing network. Putting those two in complement through the Gooten order management system is where our platform will go.
And would it be an e-commerce platform that would manage the disparate fulfillment platforms, or how would that work?
Yeah, In a lot of ways. And I think there’s so much change so quickly and so many complimentary services that I always hesitate to take what we look at as Gooten looks at it. We constantly focus on the needs of our merchant partners, understanding their pain points, alleviating those, and, in many ways, partnering with best-in-class software. There are so many software solutions out there that, whether Gooten builds it into our platform or natively integrates it, what’s most important when we look at it is how we save our merchant partners time.
How do we allow them to communicate better and connect with their end customer? Focus on the only three things that matter: traffic conversion, rate, and average card value are the only three things that matter for a merchant. So, how can we allow them to focus on revenue-generating activities, which are interacting with their customers, creating content, creating value, and take away really everything that happens behind that, whether it’s our supply chain solutions, white-label customer support solutions that we offer through our platform transparency, and the ease and ability to respond to a changing customer environment by introducing new and novel products that extend the value of that content because, again, unless it’s sold, there is no cost to taking that item on?
As it makes sense, how can you go from a storefront with 100 products to 500 products, for example, and again give your customer that sort of choice and selection that an on-demand supply chain can provide while still staying true to the voice of your brand, and what your end customer expects, and who is a Gooten customer? What does their profile look like? We are an enterprise platform, so we increasingly have larger and larger businesses on our platform where they’re doing 25, 50, and 200 orders a day, and the idea of order processing just can’t be done manually. It just can’t, so, an api connection in where the Gooten platform accepts at the time of checkout, the order routes through the Gooten platform and it’s immediately passed through to one of our 50 manufacturing partners to be produced and shipped; really looking at it at a volume that’s incredibly important because the volume, and the sort of two assets that our merchants have, time and capital, so that’s going to be marketing capital that’s going to be then the time of the day that’s really where the Gooten platform enables a growing amount of enterprises to either integrate on-demand commerce into a content creation site, and complement that idea of online with offline all the way to shifting legacy production chains, which were done in-house where you had a production manager, a logistics manager; now you have the ability for the Gooten supply chain to effectively take that entire process out of your company relying on the Gooten operations team, for example, to monitor the health of your shipments and production regularly and reinvesting in marketing, and sales, and customer acquisition activities internally.
You indicated that you have global aspirations. What is your current reach?
I think we’ve shipped to 183 countries. We have locations in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australia, and India. We’re looking at opening up Europe and replicating the product set within Europe, but ultimately, we want the Gooten supply chain solution to be replicated globally. We believe in the same concept of producing in Nevada to ship to California and producing in New Jersey to ship to New York. That same concept should be true: production in Germany can ship to Germany, production in France can ship to France, and production in Brazil can ship to Sao Paulo.
We want to bring the best of global hardware and increase the underlying business on a worldwide basis through technology and integration so that we’re sending a data packet 9,000 miles instead of a package that helps for sustainability, that helps from an environmental standpoint, that also helps from a localization standpoint. Localizing commerce to South Korea does not make sense if your production partner is in Cleveland, Ohio. But, still, when you do have that capability when you can produce in South Korea to ship to South Korea, you now open up a market that, just like America, wants something customized for them and, so, that’s really where the Gooten platform is going to go; that a single integration can provide a global reach for online merchants and commerce. They need to do exactly what they must now: understand their end customer, their needs and desires, and connect with that customer with every interaction.
And not every platform is for every customer. So, who shouldn’t use this platform?
Yeah. We have to take that look at people who are doing the proverbial side hustle and are going on and selling maybe one order item a week. The Gooten enterprise system doesn’t allow for this. We have a lot of power user tools. There is a lot of perfect product creation, and platforms allow for a single order. This is not for people buying for themselves; we are not a platform for the end customer. We’re a supply chain platform.
We look to see a lot of our businesses migrate over to Gooten as they mature; as they start to break out of the constraints that other platforms may have, that are looking much more at one or two items a week kind of sale, our platform has a sort of time element from an investment standpoint to stand your products up to get them published out to the store that if you’re not selling in volume, that if you’re not dedicated to this sort of primary purpose, it doesn’t make as much sense, for tiny sellers but as industries are moving over to commerce as they are as they’re complementing an existing supply chain solution as they understand, for example, the ability for an API to be incredibly flexible; that you have an API into a supply chain solution. So those are the primary businesses that can benefit from the Gooten enterprise solution.
And I’m also assuming that, to some degree, there needs to be a product right versus. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if someone is selling knowledge, a white paper, or something like that and charging 25 bucks for a report. I’m assuming we’re not expecting to see that.
We don’t, but the Gooten platform does complement businesses in exciting ways, which is why we have the platform. We’ve seen people take that idea of a white paper and extend the critical elements from that wipe.
What are the three takeaways they’ll put on a product, and they’ll sell that product, or they’ll create sort of the opportunity for a product to amplify the message so the idea of e-commerce, as an extension of the brand, the sort of 360 ideas, that it’s not? You don’t write an article, and when you sell something, right? If you look at what barstool sports have done incredibly well. They don’t write an article and then sell a shirt. They write an article about a shirt, so the shirt becomes part of the story and community. Purchasing that shirt makes it more and more a part of that universe. So, the sort of product and e-commerce enablement platform that Gooten allows you to extend that idea of the brand and self-identification. If you believe in what we’re doing here, this is a way to do it.
You’re right, though there are businesses where it doesn’t make sense to do this. For businesses where it does, though, this is the best way to do it. You no longer have huge supply chains, vendor relationships, inventory relationships, and working capital tied up. The on-demand platform can complement your business to the extent that it makes sense so that you’re really with your customers in every way they want to self-identify with your brand.
So, Brian, if our listeners are excited about this or want to learn more, where should they go?
www.gooten.com You can find out why we are called Gooten. It is an homage to Johannes Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press—the democratization of knowledge.
It is spelled differently.
It’s spelled differently because the website domain was cheaper to purchase that way.
We’re still a US-based company. But really, the printing press was the greatest invention in human history because the ability to give knowledge to everyone opened up everything. We’re looking at doing the same thing by democratizing the supply chain. We create thousands, if not millions, of direct consumer brands so that the content creator benefits most from their connection with the end customer. So, at www.gooten.com, you can sign up and create an account. We can walk you through our onboarding flow, exactly how to get set up and, for enterprises who are looking to integrate into the on-demand world, our first-rate knowledge, whether it’s through our account management solutions or our white papers, can help you get you up to speed as quickly as possible. That’s one of the major benefits of the Gooten platform. We assign account managers to each enterprise that we have. They’re not going at this alone. We’re your partner from setup through launch and then, obviously, post-sale.
We talked a bit about bringing this closure, though we spoke about the one-off, which is probably not the right platform. If you’re interested in this platform, how big or what kind of order frequency is optimal for thinking about two orders daily?
If you’re going to invest the time and believe that you can drive two orders a day, that’s 60 orders a month, around 750 to 800 orders a year. That’s the right size. If you’re doing one-off orders, you must figure out, “Am I connecting with my end customer the right way/?” “Am I on the right platform?” “Do I have the right marketing?” “Do I frankly have the right content and message at a two-order-a-day sort of level?” That’s where a lot of the Gooten services can start to amplify. What you’re already doing, whether that’s complementary products, greater reach, or greater areas, allows you to focus deeper and deeper on traffic cart value and conversion rate.
How can you ensure you get that check out when something goes into your cart?
That’s where it makes the most sense to join the Gooten platform. If you’re just experienced experimenting, several different platforms are fantastic; meager costs to integrate with and set up, but when you’re starting to drive that business differential, you need a powerful platform that can handle scale as you continue to find that exact right customer fit, Gooten can scale with your business.
Brian, we very much appreciate your time today. We look forward to learning more about Gooten because we’ll visit the website, looking for great things in the future. So again, thank you very much.
Sounds great, Mike. Appreciate it; English (auto-generated) AllSalesRecently uploaded.
On-Demand Fulfilment
Rainey has led Gooten through three years of rapid growth, helping online stores manufacture and deliver products from T-shirts to pet supplies. Here are some trends he is seeing going into 2021:
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Fast growth in customized and personalized products across industries.
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Fashion and apparel brands will embrace on-demand manufacturing to limit inventory write-offs, reduce environmental waste, and support consumers’ increased desire for made-to-order products.
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More legacy businesses will dive deeper into eCommerce by connecting their customers to audiences with products tied to their brands, such as online stores for media brands.
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On-demand manufacturing matures with a broader array of fabrics, materials, and design complexity.
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More brands adopt a hybrid inventory model combining traditional manufacturing and on-demand.
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Consumers’ increased interest in sustainability will lead to broader transparency in supply chains.
Gooten is a globally distributed production and logistics company transforming how online stores manufacture and fulfill consumer merchandise.
“We give businesses the tools to create products to sell online and manage orders across many stores and sales channels. Businesses powered by Gooten can source and identify new products and trends, run promotions, and track analytics on new and repeat purchasers while focusing business efforts on what drives revenues – creating, developing, and marketing brands and products. Thousands of businesses use us and have shipped over two million items to over 160 countries, and you may already own something we’ve made without knowing it!”
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