Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gooten CMO Mark Kapczynski (Part 1)

A deep dive into the custom e-commerce world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as Gooten to our audience.

Mark Kapczynski: I’m the Chief Marketing Officer here at Gooten. I’ll first say that Gooten has now entirely moved to working virtually. We used to be headquartered in New York. Now we are completely virtual with our entire executive team spread throughout the United States. We have embraced the situation that we are in.

We are enjoying the work from home environment and proving that it can work remotely. Gooten is an e-commerce platform provider. It’s a little bit different from Shopify or BigCommerce. We partner closely with them. We are a supply chain solution as part of the e-commerce platform stack. We focus on demand manufacturing and fulfillment.

We do that for e-commerce brands all across the world. We have a particular specialty in home décor and apparel. We support a little over 200 different product lines. We provide all of that supply chain as an out-of-the-box solution for e-commerce businesses. 

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down a little bit and talk about what is in the platform? What is in the platform that is differentiated?

Mark Kapczynski: One of our marketing phrases, “You sell, we fulfill.” What we try to do is provide a full turnkey outsource supply chain solution whether it’s one person building a Shopify store to sell a product online or a large enterprise.

If you are on the low end and you are just starting as a designer, for example, and you want to sell canvas prints and wall art, you can simply upload your designs to Gooten and build your storefront. If you sell wall art with your design on it, the order gets automatically routed to Gooten.

We have a global network of over 80 locations and 50 manufacturers for which we manage the production. It’s called on-demand manufacturing. The production of the wall art, for example, gets produced on demand, put in a box and wrapped up, a mailing slip gets inside, and the box gets sealed and shipped to the end customer.

For a designer who purely wants to design interesting items and sell those, we make it so that they don’t have to worry about the complexities of manufacturing fulfillment, shipping, and all the difficult parts of e-commerce. The items go right to the end consumer. The designer never has to touch a piece of inventory.

We try to make it simple. It scales from a one-person shop to a large enterprise. We have some agencies that power 2,000 shops on behalf of some large music brands. We have everything in between. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click one level down and talk about the different types of products that you support. You talked about wall art. Talk about all other categories of products that you have a presence in. 

Mark Kapczynski: We have 200 different product lines or so that make up 15,000 different skews when you include all the different variants, sizes, and shapes. Those items can be a form of apparel- a simple t-shirt to different kinds of clothing. It can be a sweatshirt, polo shirt, pants, or shorts. We have around 70 or 80 apparel lines that we support.

On the home décor side, it’s canvas wraps, wall art, pillows, pet bandana, pet pillow, or dog bed. It goes all the way from a swaddle blanket for a baby to a bath towel. You can name it all. Our CEO likes to mention that we even do flip flops. It’s the whole gamut of apparel and home décor items.

Every single thing is manufactured on demand. Part of the cool thing with that is that if you are thinking about selling things online, the last thing you want to worry about is having to pre-purchase a bunch of bulk inventory, figure out where to store it, and do the pick, pack, and shipping.

Everything in our universe is that every order that comes gets manufactured on the fly and put in a box, sealed up, and shipped out. Not only is it efficient, it also helps businesses avoid the risks of spending a lot of money on bulk inventory in advance.

We are also green and sustainable. We are not wasting any material. We are not pre printing 1,000 t-shirts and then end up selling only half of them. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Gooten CMO Mark Kapczynski
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