Can you tell us about your background and how it led you to your current role as CRO?

Before joining Kibo, I led the teams at Oracle that were responsible for Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) and B2B Commerce. Then in 2018, I joined Kibo to lead the sales function and transitioned to the Chief Revenue Officer role following the spin-off of Kibo’s personalization business in 2022. By folding the sales and marketing teams under one function, we’ve been able to implement a holistic go-to-market strategy that helps leading retailers, manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers embrace composable commerce across the entirety of their commerce operations, including and beyond the storefront.

How do you approach revenue growth, and what strategies have been most successful for you?

First and foremost, we focus on strategies that will help our clients accelerate revenue growth—no matter where they are in their digital maturity. We’ve worked with companies with existing composable architectures and companies on a more traditional commerce approach with composable on the roadmap.

Modern composable commerce goes beyond the storefront, and we’ve been making thoughtful investments to build composable solutions that span across order routing, inventory management, subscriptions, cart and checkout, and more. We continue to invest in our partner ecosystem and provide them with tools that help them innovate and drive a higher ROI for our shared clients, including pre-built storefronts and starter kits. We’ve recently partnered with Builder.io to provide a seamless integration and unified frontend commerce experience, and we’ve launched a series of co-marketing efforts, including a video series with Ignitiv and PeakActivity and in-depth how-to guides with Cognizant and Wipro.

Can you discuss any trends or recent changes in the industry that are impacting businesses? 

We’re starting to see a shift in how people think about composable commerce as more businesses—both B2B and B2C—seek composable solutions for supply chain, fulfillment, customer service, and other areas across their entire enterprise.

As the commerce world moves away from feature-function solutions and towards composability, these companies need to ensure that they’re solving their unique use cases. There are composable solutions out there that provide the APIs, but you still have to build out your functions, processes, and workflows in another platform. Kibo provides 100% universal API coverage of commerce services within a single admin UI so users can easily extend and compose the platform.

How do you align sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive revenue growth? 

Companies have so many options in the market that it’s becoming more complex to pinpoint their unique use cases and find a solution that can solve them. Our sales, marketing, and client success teams work together to simplify this process, starting with the first introduction to Kibo. Our sales and marketing teams introduce use case concepts externally through white papers and videos and bring them to life through on-demand webinars and interactive demos. The client success team focuses on capability adoption and ensuring clients understand how to unlock maximum value with our composable solutions.

Why are leading B2B companies adopting a composable commerce approach, and how are you different? 

Gartner suggests that B2B companies with digital commerce as part of their offerings will see 30% more revenue compared to competitors. By adopting a composable commerce strategy, B2B companies can scale their digital commerce ecosystem and more easily pivot as buyer expectations evolve. For example, Coastal Construction recently implemented Kibo’s composable eCommerce and Order Management solutions, and they now have a unified omnichannel B2C-like experience with streamlined B2B processes.

B2B organizations are historically less digitally mature than B2C, so Kibo built an omnichannel starter storefront to help them get to market quicker using modern technology that won’t be a risk to them in the future.

How do you measure the success of your revenue growth initiatives? 

We measure our success based on our clients’ successes. We prioritize helping our clients understand the broader and long-term value of composable commerce to ensure they maximize their ROI. If you want to see Kibo’s successes first-hand, visit acehardware.com as a shopper, which is powered by Kibo eCommerce and Order Management, or Google Ace Hardware—they were recently ranked as one of the top 10 franchises in the world for 2023 by Entrepreneur Magazine.

What do you think is the most effective marketing channel that, in turn, helped you drive more revenue? 

Our clients and partners have been our most effective marketing channels—when they see great results from Kibo, they recommend us to their colleagues. Analysts like Forrester and Gartner have also been effective in helping solidify Kibo’s place in the market. Kibo was named the Leader in the Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Solutions, Q2 2022 report, and we ranked highest for the B2C Digital Commerce Use Case in the August 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Digital Commerce Platforms report.

Would you like to shed some light on your technologies and how they help drive revenue? 

We use a variety of best-of-breed marketing technologies—with care—to ensure we’re providing the right information to the right people when they need and want it. We focus on delivering educational content for each stage in the buying process to help companies understand composable solutions for Order Management, eCommerce, and Subscriptions and determine if Kibo makes sense for their business.

How does Composable Commerce help deliver the desired results? 

The desired results for anyone pursuing composable commerce is to be able to satisfy customer demand in whatever way that might shift based on trends in the market. Kibo’s composable commerce helps companies simplify complex commerce by giving developers the freedom to innovate and business users the flexibility to create optimal experiences. Kibo’s end-to-end commerce capabilities seamlessly deploy, upgrade, and function in any combination to help companies meet consumer expectations and achieve their business objectives.

How are unified commerce and headless commerce revolutionizing the customer experience? 

Many of the benefits of headless are around performance—something as simple as improving the page load time at cart and checkout when multiple discounts are applied can make a huge difference in the customer experience, as proven by City Furniture. Home Hardware switched to headless and composable commerce with Kibo, and as a result, they saw a 3,000% increase in site speed.

Unified commerce is more than the customer experience—it’s about unifying the technology that powers customer experiences. For example, with Kibo’s headless and composable solutions, companies can bring inventory data to site search to ensure relevant results and boost product discovery.

Here are a couple of ways Kibo’s clients are achieving unified commerce:

• ExperienceNow, a ticketing platform for experiences, is currently using Kibo Search to deliver lightning-fast relevancy at scale and automate search suggestions to ensure customers have accurate experiences.
• Boscov’s unified their commerce technology by implementing Kibo eCommerce and Order Management—making it easier to roll out experiences like buy online and pick up in-store, which resulted in a 40% in-store upsell rate on BOPIS purchases.

What do you think lies in the future of composable commerce?

Three main things lie in the future of composable commerce:

1. Usability: There will be more focus on building composable solutions with daily business users in mind and enabling them to build ‘anywhere’ customer experiences.
2. True focus on unified commerce and composability: The market thinks these two things can’t live together without a significant amount of effort. Kibo has proven this untrue with our fully composable platform that allows companies to deliver unified experiences quickly.
3. Consolidation: We expect to see the consolidation of smaller solutions competing for their niche in the market.

What was the vision and purpose of Deliveright as it came to fruition, and how has it changed over time?

Deliveright was founded in 2018 to bring cutting-edge technology and final-mile delivery transparency to the big and bulky goods segment of the supply chain industry. There are many quality delivery providers, but there are few technology solutions available to them—and the big and bulky goods industry is even more hampered, as many delivery services like FedEx and UPS refuse to deliver anything weighing over 150 pounds. With digital commerce growing exponentially, online sellers needed a logistics solution for the delivery of big and bulky products. Deliveright’s Grasshopper platform was designed as a complete technology solution for these specialized companies, combining OMS (order management systems), WMS (warehouse management systems), TMS (transportation management systems), and more into one package, and we’ve improved these features and added new ones with each new version. After developing Grasshopper and implementing it for carriers and shippers all over the U.S., Deliveright began handling B2B shipments as well. Today, we have over 1,000 customers that rely on our network.

How does Deliveright differentiate itself from other heavy goods delivery service companies?

We are a technology-first, asset-light, big and bulky goods solution; our Grasshopper platform provides total transparency across every step of the process, not just integrating with outdated legacy processes but helping companies move beyond them. Deliveright has built an entire network of organizations servicing the delivery process, all running on the same platform, offering real-time tracking and various features to improve the experience.

Can you walk us through the company's growth and expansion process over the years?

From day one, we knew our mission was to bring technology to facilitate the big and bulky goods logistics process to the market. But while we started with the technology, we soon ended up with our boots on the ground in the delivery business ourselves. We learned early on that the best way to build our technology platform, Grasshopper, was by running a final-mile delivery network ourselves. We started with one terminal on the East Coast and quickly grew to three terminals. After 100,000+ shipments, we started to license Grasshopper to other delivery companies, and today we have a nationwide network of licensees, some of which also make big and bulky deliveries for Deliveright. Shippers can manage logistics and final-mile deliveries for almost every zip code in the U.S. through Deliveright. That early hands-on experience proved critical for insight into which solutions and tools truly meet shippers’ needs.

Can you share any exciting new developments or initiatives that Deliveright has in the works?

In line with our mission to always increase the level of transparency we offer our clients, we just released version 3.0 of our Grasshopper platform, which provides even more detailed visibility to shippers. In addition to further streamlining the integration of OMS, WMS, and TMS to provide real-time data, we’ve improved our user interface so that adopting Grasshopper is easier than ever.

Since you mentioned Grasshopper technology, can you further elaborate on how the AI-powered platform is automating complicated logistics? And how has Grasshopper upped the efficiency game in the digital supply chain network?

Grasshopper automates the entire fulfillment process in several ways:

• Automated scheduling based on capacity, volume, and drive time limitations: We enable customers to schedule deliveries on their own time without the need to involve the operations team.
• Warehouse allocation optimization: Making sure that pieces are placed in the right locations and picked in the right order to ensure accurate and optimized loading of trailers. These recommendations are based on insight from our own experience working with warehouses and are also reactive to new data about what configurations maximize worker efficiency and minimize damages.
• Routing optimization: Making sure that each route is optimized based on customer limitations like access hours, as well as drive time, truck capacity, and other factors that may vary based on the customer and the product.
• End-to-end visibility: Because our comprehensive solution can handle every step of the supply chain, Grasshopper provides true end-to-end visibility from the manufacturer’s loading dock all the way to the customer’s home. We don’t just connect and aggregate with other platforms, stitching together a unified view; we are the single operating system being used by all parties along the way.

How has Grasshopper contributed to saving time and reducing human error in logistics operations?

There are countless examples of how Grasshopper saves time and reduces human error, and at the foundation of all of them is the way it allows every item in every shipment to be tracked individually and precisely. This helps keep related but technically separate items, like a headboard and footboard, from being separated. Every warehouse worker uses Grasshopper’s mobile app to scan each item at the start and finish of any move. Then, the delivery team does the same, with all the information being gathered in the same place. This ensures the proper picking, handling, and loading of items from the designated location in the warehouse into the correct trucks. They are then directed and delivered to the correct location, all while minimizing damages and maximizing transparency. In doing so, Grasshopper has quadrupled the overall efficiency of a warehouse employee and greatly reduced lost or misplaced items.

What perks can one expect to gain through Grasshopper Lite?

Grasshopper Lite is our “try now, buy later” version, created for managing just one truck to help small organizations and give prospective customers a sense of the benefits of the full version.

Are you planning on any notable partnerships or collaborations in the near future?

Yes, we’re currently working on a major partnership with one of the largest digital commerce platforms in the world, which we’ll be announcing soon. We’re also launching Grasshopper-for-Vendors, which will allow vendors and shippers to manage all of their shipments on one platform.

How does Deliveright stay ahead of industry trends and continuously innovate its services?

Members of our research and development team are continually working to keep Grasshopper cutting-edge through improvements like upgrading to the latest tech stack, as well as projects to improve existing features and introduce new ones. With more than 1.5 million shipments already completed on our platform, we leverage what we’ve learned from how our customers use the platform to enhance both their experience and the consumer’s experience.

In your opinion, what does the future of delivery look like, and how does Deliveright plan to stay ahead of the curve with powerful platforms like Grasshopper?

The world is moving toward more accurate and holistic logistics management. As we continue to build the Deliveright/Grasshopper network and provide additional connectivity, we see Grasshopper becoming the backbone that enables retailers’ visibility into their third-party carriers. More and more retailers are understanding the benefits of providing consumers with tracking visibility during the checkout process, and we expect to expand this offering as more retailers see this as a requirement.

In general, the Deliveright/Grasshopper combination enables every local retailer to sell nationwide with little or no change to their model. Instead of just selling within a 100-mile radius of their headquarters, they can offer their products to a nationwide audience and let Deliveright handle everything. Deliveright’s nationwide capability has enabled significant growth for our brick-and-mortar retailers, who are now able to vastly expand their market.

As we know, Elastic Path Composable Frontend accelerates building modular, digital commerce, Next.js frontends based on users’ responses to a few questions. How do you see brands embracing this new experience?

Brands are eager to embrace a Composable Commerce approach as it enables them to deliver high-performance commerce experiences that exceed customer expectations and drive revenue. But complexity and risk are a concern for brands—with so many options available regarding frontends, the paradox of choice often presents an issue.

Composable Frontend offers brands an advanced starting point for their frontend build. Leveraging Next.js, it connects to our Composable Commerce APIs and is full of best practices for frontend development. This provides a high-performance frontend of the box without the plumbing, allowing businesses to focus on what they do best—building extraordinary, high-performing digital experiences.

What was your vision behind the launch of Composable Frontend?

More and more brands are pursuing a Composable Commerce approach to create the differentiated brand experiences that digital commerce businesses need to evolve.

The Composable Frontend extends the core principles of composable to the frontend experience. It enables brands to break free of the rigidity imposed by all-in-one monolithic applications without swinging the pendulum to a completely custom frontend that is expensive to build and maintain.

The Composable Frontend is a modular, extensible approach to frontend development, helping customers reduce time to market for new commerce experiences without the tradeoffs that all-in-one solutions impose. 

What, in your view, is the biggest strength of Composable Frontend?

Composable Frontend accelerates the development of frontend experiences, taking care of the necessary blocking and tackling needed to launch new digital experiences. It also removes much of the risk of the frontend build for a Composable Commerce application as it’s connected to Elastic Path Commerce Cloud’s APIs and leading third-party technologies, including Algolia and Builder.io.

Composable Frontend equips companies with a high-performance frontend with commerce best practices built right in, enabling teams to focus on launching and generating revenue ASAP.

How user-friendly is this solution from the end-user perspective?

Composable Frontend is for use by developers building frontend experiences. Built in Next.js, it takes advantage of development best practices to accelerate the time to launch. Developers can hit the ground running with Composable Frontend, focusing on their unique digital experience requirements. Many frontend components come pre-integrated with preferred third-party providers (search, CMS, payments, shipping) in addition to Elastic Path Commerce Cloud’s APIs.

How do you see Composable Frontend changing the market dynamics?

• Accelerate time-to-market: cuts launch times in half
• Speeds frontend experiences thanks to no extra bloat
• Reduces implementation risk

How does Composable Frontend – a business-ready solution help brands deliver high performance?

Composable Commerce enables brands to compose “best-of-breed” technology into one business-ready solution. Composable Frontend, however, automatically and quickly builds a modular, Next.js frontend based on users’ responses to simple configuration questions. It provides a high-performance combination of static pages and dynamic data on the frontend. Faster page load speeds result in better SEO since static sites are fast, light, and easy to scan, resulting in better conversion rates.

What’s in store for the future of Composable Frontend?

Going forward, we expect to add more elective components to Composable Frontend, broadening the range of prospective use cases it can address from the same high-performance framework.