The Endless-ish Aisle

Phillip and Brian have FOMO over guerrilla marketing in the *bathroom*, and break down the Jackson family walkthrough of Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart. Stick around for BigCommerce CEO Brent Bellm’s sit down with Brian live from Shoptalk. 

“From $70M to $700M”

Key takeaways:

- ShopTalk has become the biggest pure-play event in North America for e-commerce, showcasing the growth and optimism in the industry.

- AI is making its way into various tools and solutions, embedding Gen AI to increase efficiency in teams.

- TikTok is seen as a viable platform for brands to engage with new audience segments, and it offers a unique opportunity for creators to collaborate with brands.

- Checkout replacement tools are shifting gears, aiming for faster and more adaptable solutions to meet the evolving needs of e-commerce businesses.

- Omega Mart by Meow Wolf is an immersive art exhibit that satirizes capitalism and consumerism, allowing visitors to explore a surreal grocery store with twisted products on the shelves.

• {00:15:41} - “There are a lot of solutions that are actually embedding Gen AI in their tools. Everything from data cleanliness to customer service to product copy to marketing and other tools. I think everyone's just barely actually embedding it in a way that will actually increase efficiency in teams.” - Brian
• {00:27:15} - “{TikTok Shop} is closer to almost like a B2B2C model. You have your home designers and fabric stores sell to those home designers and they work their fabrics into the homes that they're influencing. It's almost the same thing. Managing these effectively, you know, designers for all kinds of experiences, not just homes, but beauty, fashion, whatever it is.” - Brian
• {00:52:47} - “The overarching philosophy of metamodernism in that the best way to deliver an experience is to engage in both culture and commerce but to do so with a wink to say, "We both know that for this thing to exist that you really want that I have to play into the commercial nature of the way that it exists. And so I will critique that so that you can't critique it, Mrs Consumer. I will critique it for us, but we both know that the only way that you're going to get this and the only way you can deliver this and experience this is if it's commercialized in some way," and that is the overarching narrative of Omega Mart.” - Phillip
• {00:59:15} - “You can press a button and have a catalyst store on Next.js and React, the highest performing most popular tech in the world of composable, in under 60 seconds pre-integrated with all of our functionality, as well as leading content management solutions, as well as leading search and merch engines, out of the box hosting from top partners like Vercel. We have so lowered the bar to the world's best composable tech that we think that's the future, and it's perfectly timed with the growth again of MACH enthusiasm in the US.” - Brent
• {01:07:21} - “What if we turned Makeswift, not just for content websites, which is what it was built for, into commerce websites too? And that was the sort of the magic aha idea, and I think we are going to transform the industry.” - Brent
• {01:13:29} - “We're open sourcing the React component library. Meaning, any agency, any developer can come in and contribute a new component or enhance a component. We'll make sure it's secure. We'll be sort of the gatekeepers on the quality, but you're not dependent just on the components that BigCommerce builds. Anybody can be building new extraordinary website components that go into the library and make it that much more powerful to leverage that library.” - Brent

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