Future

When I was 6 years old, my parents took all $25,000 in equity from their home to open a tiny health food store.

(How’s that for an ice breaker? I’m Jeremiah Prummer, the founder of KnoCommerce and now the CEO of Stamped, Repeat and Kno.)

Every day after school, I'd hang out at the store and watch my 3 younger siblings while my parents closed up for the day.

We'd go home, eat dinner, and go to bed. Then they'd "count the till," do whatever paperwork needed done, and run it back the next day.

I basically grew up in that store. And as I got older, I worked at the store, doing every single task you could think of.

When I started getting into eCommerce at 21, I was struck by just how different it was from the brick-and-morter store I grew up in. In a lot of ways, I still am.

I spent thousands of hours working in that store before moving away to college—more than a decade of my life transacting face-to-face with people.

I knew how they dressed, the kind of clothing they wore, WHY they bought the products they did (dietary restrictions, health concerns, etc.). I knew their age, gender, family size, etc. And while I had a decent idea about the frequency and products they bought, I couldn't tell you exactly. I could still tell you—with incredible detail—a lot about our most frequent customers, but I couldn’t quantify their value to us. There were no metrics we had access to that would give us that information.

Ecommerce is basically the inverse. I know exactly when you bought which products. I know what you bought first, and how long it took you to go from buying product A to product B. I know your lifetime value, your average spend, etc. I can quantify everything about you as a customer. But I really don't know who you are or why you buy.

In ecommerce, we call this gap customer development, and it usually gets done at two different stages during a brand’s lifecycle: At the very beginning and when it becomes a massive corporation.

Founders often are their brand’s first customers, and, when they’re not, they’re the ones doing the marketing, the customer support, the fulfillment. If they’re running a CPG brand, they’re likely running a sample booth and talking to customers. Or, if they’re an early apparel business, picking up the phone and talking to someone who places a large order.

At some point, though, the brand grows enough that the founder can’t keep up with this. And then what happens?

In most cases, nothing. At least until the brand gets large enough to have a customer research/cultural research team (or hire an agency like Wieden + Kennedy or Kantar). For nearly every DTC brand, those days are still far away.

What excites me about the opportunity to bring KnoCommerce together with Stamped and Repeat is the idea that we can close this gap.

What if we can marry the best of brick-and-mortar’s intimacy with the best of ecommerce’s hard data? And then use both to build a more powerful shopping experience?

A lot of technology talk right now is about agentic shopping, the idea that an AI agent will shop on behalf of a consumer, because it better knows that consumer’s preferences around brand, price, functionality, etc.

When it happens, it’s an experience that will dissociate the brand from the consumer even more than ecommerce did. If ecommerce traded intimacy for data, it appears—right now at least—that agentic shopping will take away most of the data, leaving brands grasping for both the consumer insights they’re already missing and the data to smooth over those gaps.

I’m not sure when this is happening, but I’m fairly certain it is happening, and part of the solution might be making brand experiences so good that people prefer to engage with the brand through its own channels (email, sms, website, etc) over the option of having an agent take care of everything for them.

This, I think, makes sense: We already prioritize attention for certain brands and product categories over others. So, the fight will be to get your brand into that priority level with enough customers such that you keep enough data to know who your customer is, why they buy from you and what they want to see from you in the future.

Reviews, loyalty, surveys, retention oriented repurchasing... These are all pieces of a puzzle that's going to get REALLY exciting in the years to come.

And for me, it's a bit of a full circle moment, a way for me to engage with my childhood self without giving up the adult dreams I've been chasing.

So keep your eyes out. We're gonna be doing a lot of good stuff in the months to come.