S3E05: Brendan Cameron - Lessons from a B2B Insider - Live from Shoptoberfest!

Welcome to Commerce Famous, a podcast that celebrates the celebrities of our industry. Join us for a conversation with the tastemakers in ecommerce. In their daily lives, these are just normal everyday people like you and me. But to us, they are commerce fans. Alright.

Welcome to a special edition of Commerce Famous. This is episode five and in season three. Very excited today to have a special guest named Brendan Cameron from American Eagle. Brendan, thanks for being here. Yeah.

Good to be here. I I I'm getting distracted by the large disco ball in a beer garden. Well, you know, that well, that's you're setting me up. So we are actually today, we're broadcasting live from Shoptoberfest, a community event hosted by Shopware and our partners in our community here in Brooklyn, New York. And so, yeah, Brendan, maybe we'll start off by you describing where we're at and what this venue is.

Yeah. This place is fantastic. We we we came into New York, went down into Brooklyn, and now I suddenly ended up in, like, Germany. So it's it's entertaining to to get the miles in. Absolutely.

Yes. Well, this is a one of the oldest beer halls in North America. It's called the Radagast beer hall in Brooklyn, New York, and, Shoptoberfest is an event that we put on basically for the community. We we decided that we didn't want to have an event that was really just a commercial for shopwear, but rather one that celebrates the industry and our partnerships, and there is no partnership that's more meaningful to shopwear than American Eagle, which is, Brendon, where you work. Maybe introduce our listeners to a little bit of of who American Eagle is, and we'll get into your background and history and why you're commerce famous.

So I'd I'd start without a joke, but because of that Sydney Sweeney ad, I have to kinda differentiate. We were americaneagle.com. I don't we don't sell jeans. We don't sell shirts or clothing, but we're, we're a full service digital agency out of Chicago, Illinois. We're family owned and operated.

We have three generations of people working there ever since, the late nineteen seventies, which was you'd think before Internet, but, doing websites for over twenty five years. I started about fifteen years ago, when we were just about a 100 people maybe, and today we have over seven fifty employees worldwide, so it's been a quite a trip, you could say. Yes. Well, one of the things that's unique about your background is that you've really been very loyal, to American Eagle. You've worked there for a very long time and had a tremendous amount of success.

How did you how did you land at American Eagle? Maybe we'll start with that part of your origin story. Yeah. It's it's kinda funny. I'm actually, came in because I knew, the president and and the CEO, before there.

My family, owned a manufacturing company. We we manufactured forklifts and material handling equipment, and, my cousin was the president of that company. And, the groomsmen at his wedding was actually the president of American Eagle. So, you know, we've always been in contact. I've I've known him, for a long time, and, eventually, you know, I I got through school.

We we, sold the company, and I moved over with with Mike and Tony, and it's been, great. My background has been manufacturing and distribution my whole life. So I I kinda brought my experience into it. And the American Eagle team, we've been working on, you know, some of the earliest of ecommerce sites in this industries from, like, Magic Glove in the mid two thousands to, test equity and t equipment. So, it's it's definitely something to where I brought my experience, you know, kind of into that new technology.

Commerce Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source ecommerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already processed over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in ecommerce at shopware.com. Well, let's talk a little bit about I mean, you you are, I would say, one of 10 to 15 people in the b to b ecommerce space that is considered an expert. And when you have a keynote, the room is always packed.

I've seen it a number of times. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, your approach to b to b and and why you're such a luminary and an interesting conversational piece at at at events like TUG and other places? What what what is it about the story you tell that that fills the room? I I think it's a path of just empathy. I lived through that for for years.

It's something to where you need to understand that change management is typically the toughest thing to battle against. And having the right ideas and having the right road map or path to take is gonna be key to it because coming in hot with another technology or a new way of running your operation, everyone, I think, believes that it's a pretty simple pivot, but, you know, in order to change your shipping provider, you're affecting the dozens of people in the warehouse and the people that were taught the same thing for decades, and now you're telling them they have to turn on a dime. So a a lot of it is honestly, you just have to know that in this industry, it it needs a lot of support. It needs a lot of hand holding, and maybe not for the people that you and I interact with each day, but the people that they're going to affect. And that that I think is key in a in a lot of it.

You know, I've been, I've interacted with you quite a number of times in the field, at events, at the American Eagle headquarters, and one of the things that I find really interesting about you is how you connect the importance of the ERP, the importance of the other, like, warehouse management systems to ecommerce and to ultimately the decisions the merchant needs to make. And I know that, that interoperability between these systems is really important. Can you kinda share some of your perspective on on that? Oh, absolutely. It it's the lifeblood of of these companies.

I mean, when you talk about investments, when we're dealing with ERPs and and a lot of those centralized company systems, it's a very large investment for them, first of all. You know, some of these implementations are millions of dollars over multiple years, and they're putting everything about their company into it. You know? They're they're moving off of those legal boxes in the warehouse into into this digital piece, and and they don't know how to operate outside of that. So Uh-huh.

You know, once pricing is set up, once, you know, all this is said and done, it's typically very complex. And the last thing they wanna do is be told they have to manage it in multiple locations. So, yeah, if somebody's taken a thousand orders a week or they have a very volatile pricing structure with commodity items, telling people, hey. Now that you have a website, your workload is doubled just to maintain the status quo is not gonna be a really welcoming statement to them. Yes.

Yes. Yes. We gotta play well with the other tech. The, one of the things I love to do on this pod is really talk about Excuse me. To people who have a a a deep history of seeing ecommerce evolve over the years, what was one of the first big ecommerce projects that you got the opportunity to work on?

And do you what can you share about that experience? So my my first year, mad American Eagle, I was handed the project of Dale Carnegie Oh. Center for success and learning. That was a wake up call on really how you need to understand the company and their operations to automate it. Because having to not only do professional courses and registry and payment collection, not to mention for in person events, having enough seats available for all the registrants.

But then the fact that I had to learn how to launch over a 100 websites because they're available in over a 100 countries. Yeah. So having all those fronts and one of the most important things is that not everyone is the same internationally because you have languages like Hebrew, which are read right to left. And I'll tell you what, that is one of the things that I've kept in the back of my head ever since then because panicking about having to reverse every single layout on a website because it reads right to left or is situated right to left is So is gonna haunt me for the rest of my life, I think. We got that done in maybe a week before.

So it it's these types of projects and and situations and scenarios where I've just been able to build as time goes on. I came from the m. Or mobile. Oh, yeah. Era where, you know, we were running two storefronts.

You had the the desktop site, and then you had the mobile site. We had to then redo all of our client sites for responsive when that kinda became practice and eliminating that extra overhead. It's the amount of evolution that's happened. What web point o are we on? I know that was a big buzzword back in the day when it web two point o and web three point o were thin.

So it's just been amazing to to witness everything and and how we've matured to now where we're talking about how I could go to chat.com now and ask the potential of the the system being able to place an order for me. So I'm excited to see where everything's going. Well, I love that actually on that point around, you know, what what version are we on of the Internet. You know, it's one of the things that I find fascinating about b two b is it's a bit of a laggard adopting technology, and frankly, it should be. These are not businesses that generally have high margins.

It's not they're they're more risk averse. So how do you and American Eagle think about being very pragmatic in the way that you're kinda driving people and manufacturers and distributors to innovate and adopt what's next? If you woulda asked me three years ago, my answer to that question would be completely different. I would have said, yeah. They're ten, fifteen years kinda behind, but I'll tell you what, they're accelerating faster than what that traditional ecommerce retail experience had.

Like, you go back to Amazon in '99 and you look at Amazon today, it's light years of difference. The the thing I'm seeing with b two b is they're still in that Amazon of 1999 kind of look and feel and layout, but the thing is is that all of these companies are skipping now the next twenty five years. Yeah. So that quarter of a century, they get to leapfrog, and they're now pretty much technology on par, cost, you know, and budgets are on par. The the mentality is changing from the top down.

So it I know I started with it. Change management's the toughest thing, but I feel that with leadership, with executive and ownership, the the impetus is there. Yep. Now I think it's more about understanding where to start. And and that that may lead into a a whole separate discussion, but there's a there's a lot going on to where I think companies have a chance to not have to worry about how things work for the past twenty five years.

Yeah. They have to start talking about how the next ten years were because they don't have to worry about the baggage that the Amazons, the old navies of the world had to trudge through at retail. Yeah. Well, one of the other things that I think is unique about both your approach and American Eagle's, portfolio of services is there's about 50 different things on a menu that you can walk in and prescribe to a merchant to help them fix, automate, grow, whatever their kind of problem du jour is. Can you speak a little bit about kinda your personal process when you when you meet a merchant and you start to understand, you know, where does it hurt?

How how do you assess what services that would be a good fit for them or not? Do do you have a process you run through? Yeah. I mean, I like to think of our team as nothing more than interpreters. We're a translation service.

Yep. The biggest issues that we run into are we go into a merchant and we talk to them, and they try to talk to us in our language. Yep. And I'll tell you that's a habit I try to break right away because they don't know this world like we do in the same way that we don't know their world like they did. And that lost in translation is where all the friction and and trouble happens.

So when I when I go into a client, the first thing I tell everyone is imagine you just hired me. I'm a new employee. Let's go through your onboarding process because I wanna understand your business operations. I don't want you to try to tell me how tech is supposed to run. And, typically, once they start telling me about their day to day lives, that's where you start to see the they have trouble with customer acquisition.

Well, that's digital marketing. They have an issue with their salespeople doing everything by hand. That's ecommerce automation. They have, you know, low margins. That may be some of the integration or automation efficiency work.

So just by telling them to try to drop their tech thoughts and just treat us like a new onboarding employee has made everyone more comfortable. They've made expectations more realistic, because I love sitting through demos and having AI do everything perfectly. Yeah. Chuckling on the back end being like, you know that once that's in somebody's normal's hands, it's breaking the media. So real world is not scripted.

It's not as clean as the story. Well, so let's talk a little bit about the future. I mean, I think you said it well. There's an opportunity for maybe some of the technically laggard businesses who may be a family business where now the younger generation is taking over. They they call up American Eagle.

They fly you in. You've done the assessment. You know how to help them. When they say, how do we adopt AI? How do we play in the world of agentic?

Like, what what? I know I'm speaking in generalities here, but are there things that you see that are uniquely applicable to these distributors that in in in the next realm of ecommerce that is top of mind? Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's the little battles. The thing I typically jump on first and foremost is search.

Yeah. You know, hop on with with natural language processing. Get more contextual data processing. But even before any of that starts, get your data in order. I know it's probably been beaten to death at this point, but garbage in, garbage out is very, very real.

And before we start trying to build a data warehouse or an LLM and then saying, well, I could have the AI clean up my product descriptions or add page titles or SEO. You have to realize that it's sampling the data you already have to build out those new ones. So unless you have some kind of baseline, I think the preparation to evolve in the AI work is is the biggest thing right now, and it's typically where I try to start. Obviously, some companies are better off than others, and and we have opportunities. But, really, the the first thing before that AI discussion comes up is gonna be how well is your data aligned.

How prepared are you for the future? Yep. Right on. So in terms of where you decide to spend time, again, I I consider Ucommerce famous because every time I go to a specifically, like, an ERP event, you, have a bunch of people always at the American Eagle booth. So how do you decide where you go spend your time, how you get out in the community?

Like, give us examples of of where you think you'll be through the rest of the year. Yeah. I'm I'm literally about to start, I feel like, a world tour. Yeah. We have I have, six events in the next ten weeks, I think.

A lot of it is, again, revolving around that that manufacturing and distribution, a lot of it around other platforms or associations. And where I always focus is just listening to the members and the merchants and where those pinpoints are. I'm working on something right now for our electrical distribution customers where they do a lot of work in wire cut services. So if you ever are outside of construction site, you see those big wooden reels and spools that have thousands of feet of wire on them. It's not always one wire just rolled up.

It can be what they call multiple layers and stacks and combinations and parallels. And all of those are made to order, and it's an extremely manual process. What we're trying to do is put together a tool that can automate eight out of the 10 steps, and that will solve 90% of the problems in the companies that do wire cut services or cable cut services. So while there are definite wins out there from various pieces, I usually find the biggest ones trying just to focus on certain groups and where we can help the the greater community one way or another. Well, I think if I can if I can kinda share a little of my perspective on you personally, I think part of what makes you so commerce famous is because you don't wait for the world to come to you.

You actually go to them. You're at you're on the on airplanes. You're at events. And, frankly, you're kind of one of them. You come from the industry with your background.

You work in this industry, and so you kinda know, what they might be feeling before they even tell you they have a problem. Yeah. It it's one of those pieces of just being able to listen and and speak to people. I have a ton of very, very good clients that are very open and upfront with me because they know that I wanna help. The the biggest thing that is out there is is trying to get a big win with as little effort as possible.

Low hanging fruit is the name of this industry. If we can get, like, two hours of your sales team's time back a day Oh, yeah. And you have a sales team of 10 people, that's a hundred hours a week. Like, it it just slowly adds up and and and compounds and and starts to snowball. I was at another, b two b specific event, and they had a panel of CFOs up there, and they were very upfront with the entire organization.

They said that it's very easy for them to pull the trigger on traditional marketing channels, trade shows, print catalogs, mail campaigns, and they're very skeptical of the digital marketing aspects because the numbers and the reports are so transparent in that. They get to scrutinize it a lot more. Yes. So, again, if we could get those extremely heavily scrutinized analytics together and show the wins, again, it it gets us another dollar of AdWords spend. It gets us a new budget for maybe a a face lift of the website.

It gets us to actually pull the trigger on ecommerce. It's this entire industry is just a series of little wins that we all have to fight for. Yeah. I really like that perspective. And and, frankly, in a world where, everybody's looking for efficiency, if a CFO is sitting there, sometimes efficiency looks like less sales reps.

Sometimes it looks like the sales reps we have are simply more productive, and that's really what you're selling is how do I get you 20% more utility out of your field because they have all this other manual work they can you can make go away. I'd I'd rather have a sales rep get one new customer a month than put in five orders manually. Yeah. It's it's that simple. It's and I'm also a huge advocate for the salespeople because they are the boots on the ground.

They're the ones that get the customer feedback. They're the ones that are interacting with people daily, and I wanna make them as happy as possible. And if I could do that by giving them time back or getting them out of emailing tracking numbers and shipment dates, like, that's that's where it's at. There's a lot of blue collar work being done by white collar people. Yep.

That's exactly right. Well, listen. I really enjoyed our chat here at Shoptoberfest. Apologize for some of the background noise where there's about six or seven different podcasts happening at this moment. But one of the things we like to do, Brendan, is ask you in your mind, you've been in the industry a long time, who do you consider commerce famous that I should reach out to and have on this podcast?

And I'll tell them Brendan's saying. Oh, man. There is so many good people I love talking to and just, asking questions. I will say I I've met him a few times. I look up to him.

Matt Nichols, he was the the CIO at at Owens Cornering, the Home Depot company. I've been with him at multiple events. He's a great, extremely intelligent person, and I could just listen to his stories and solutions that he's came up with for hours. He's steadfast. I will personally reach out and and and share this audio clip with him, see if I can get him to come on.

Amazing. Awesome. Thanks for having me, sir. Thank you, buddy. Appreciate you.

Alright.