Issue #26 - Positive waves people, let’s go.
In This Issue: Vile Rumour & Gossip | VC’s Bring Green Shoots | Half-MACH is a Thing | Retailers do Retail in Shock News
Do we have seeds of regrowth in digital? Are we destined for more years of awful politicians in the UK and US? Why don’t smarter people run for positions of power? Who knows!
Vile Rumour & Gossip
“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”
Remember that Kate Moss quote? Well, it’s coming to digital. We’re hearing about “Lean” stacks, with customers looking for ways to lighten the stack and save complexity and cost. Equally, there’s a lot of pressure to have lean teams. We know of an eyewear company running a $120m eComm business with a team of 7 - fully composable and no SI partner. That’s lean 🙂
Growth is back
Physical retail took back lost ground last year, but already in 2024 digital is growing. Most eCommerce practices are up 10% and we can see 20-25% growth as a benchmark for many. Benchmark that everyone!
Shaky ground for some SaaS
The new-found funding will come too late for some vendors. Nobody will “do a Fast” and go pop quite that spectacularly, but we are of the view that at least two vendors won’t make it past the summer. In SaaS this is less painful for customers of course – the product just stops working so you switch to something else, but the privacy and security issues that arise from such a failure are maddening. More important still are the broken promises made to partners and friends.
When SI’s simply cannot win
In the current climate where digital platforms are shifting in adoption, customers are spending less on new platforms but are iterating what they have much more - there is a tier of System Integrator that is struggling to win. Carrying too much onshore cost, executing in the mid-market and a little higher, they are being outpriced by leaner agencies AND cannibalised by the enterprise SI’s coming down to play in the smaller clients. It’s tough out there people 🙁
VC’s Bring Green Shoots
In the last few days, both Vercel and OneStock have raised funding rounds. Totals in excess of $300m. To our reckoning, these are the only significant rounds in digital this last 7/8 months, and both the scale and stages of the rounds indicate that the market is unlocking.
We are anti-rocketship here at Buyingtime, but funding is essential for the market to operate. Vercel’s round is a series E so they’re nearer the exit than they are the start, the first of these exits will be more telling than what we saw this week but we’ll have to wait a while for those we reckon.
Half-MACH – WTF?
A term coined by our friend Giles Smith (He of Burberry and Selfridges creds). This seems to refer to “Lazy MACH”. 3 vendors (as opposed to 10+), with a headless front end but fewer integrations, less customisation and a quicker/cheaper time to market.
There has been pressure on the attractiveness of the composable stack in the last year. A combination of reduced funding, perceived risk and lack of experience has made many shy of even contemplating such a route. The Half-MACH approach will have purists all of a kerfuffle, but not as much as the MACH Alliance allowing compliant “Products” into the fold. This would mean Salesforce has compliant solutions which have already no doubt applied.
Meaningless to customers of course but gossip will out as we all know.
Retailers Do Retail in Shock News
We recently ran one of our rare Store Tours. What we did differently was to give a voice to the physical retail leaders who run regions, flagships and new concepts and we learned so much.
The key takeaway was just how much training goes into running a great retail team, and therefore a store. Alex from Paul Smith’s iconic Floral Street Store spoke incredibly powerfully about the obsession with storytelling they have, and how that helps persuade clients to buy things that they might not otherwise.
Any of us who remember key shopping days in our lives will testament to the fact that it is often those purchases that you cannot quite afford that give you the greatest long-term value. ECommerce does not offer those moments as we know 🙂
Enjoy everyone, summer’s here and it’ll be gone in 3 weeks in the UK so make the most of it people!
Buyingtime Dictionary
Frequently used (but never about you) phrases from Buyingtime Ltd.
Suitcase
/ˈsuːtkeɪs/
noun
1. Has to be carried by everyone else
"Barry just called me a 'suitcase'. I'm not sure what it means...can you look it up for me?"
