Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on your work. I’d like to understand the customer base. What is the target customer base? Also, do some use cases of a couple of your interesting customers that well illustrate what you’re doing.

Brian Rigney: We’ve 1,500 brands across the globe. They represent folks like Marks & Spencer and Getty Images in the UK and across North America, we’ve got New York and Company. The customer base for Publicator is very broad. It’s designed for anyone who has a PDF that they want to put online and create a very rich and engaging experience. The Creator, which is the newest one, is very much focused on the retail sector. They have a high need for creating very rich and very engaging experiences to capture their user’s attention, and to make shopping very easy. You can allow someone to shop the look and it doesn’t force the user to shop in the grid. The grid, as you might suspect, consists of those long rows and columns that are sometimes painful to shop in. They’re not inspiring.

Sramana Mitra: How does this work from a retailer system point of view? The retailer is working off a catalog, right? A catalog has all the product descriptions and images. Where does Zmags come in in that work flow?

Brian Rigney: There are two ways that we can come in to that workflow. One is if a retailer has a catalog in a PDF format and they want to use Publicator, they can convert that into a richer and more engaging format. They end up with a link. They can have commerce searchability links to that, but it does start with a PDF of the catalog. More typically, the trend for any business that wants to be online is that they’re trying to bring richer and more engaging content to their site, but to do so through coding and third party is painful, slow, and super expensive. For a retailer, if they want to create an engaging experience online, they can do so through Creator. It involves taking their raw, digital assets and putting them online through our interface. It allows them to assemble a web experience. Then they can publish that to their site. Publishing it to their site can be done in about five minutes.

Sramana Mitra: When you’re plugging into a workflow, are you doing a full catalog transfer?

Brian Rigney: With Publicator, it’s a full catalog transfer. You can take the Spring 2015 catalog and put that whole catalog online. For Creator, they’re typically focusing on a select section on the website.

Sramana Mitra: Once the work is done in Creator, does it publish back into the catalog?

Brian Rigney: It can publish back to the website.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags
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