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Tell us about your background Jon? I’m going to go a little further back than normal. It started off as a paper, boy, I have that fun part of my history. And from there to music. So there’s a lot of variety in my past that I think that has been pretty helpful in what I’m doing now. I did some advertising for a stint there for a few years then software development. This brings me to Envoy, which is what I’ve been really doing for about a decade now. I think in all of those roles, it’s been like, I’m this team guy, when I think back and look at why and how that happened?
As a paperboy I was rolling papers with my family, getting them all involved, getting my mom eventually to drive me around. And I was that team person, in music, the same thing. I was the recorder. The tour planner, the marketer on my space back in that day advertising, the same kind of thing.
I got hired at a TV station, so this was back when there was a lot of, there still are, accounts selling TV ads, and they wanted to augment their TV experience with selling digital media. So I helped them do that but had to bridge the gap between the old school and the new school together there.
So the team thing going on. That’s good for development. And CEO right now I really just consider myself our team’s champion, I help us get done what we want to get done.
Mike tell us about your background. Probably something very similar. I got started by working for my family. My dad was a professional baseball player, came back to New Orleans after his career ended, and started a small local sporting goods store. And rather than daycare, he put his kids to work and so I spent a lot of time choosing sizes on ordering, things like that when I was a little kid. And I went away to college, got a job, and then realized I felt passionate about specialty retail and my family had pivoted from generalized sporting goods to outdoor sporting goods, forced to do that by the large chains moving into our city.
We decided to start focusing on things like Patagonia and North Face, which were emerging companies in the mid-eighties. And I left my real job and came back to work for my family. I was the third generation involved in the business. My generation was all about email and websites.
I helped the company get involved very early in e-commerce then subsequently was the very first outdoor store to sell products on Amazon. So during that process of learning a lot about e-commerce and starting up like drop shipping and all these kinds of things. I was involved in various organizations with the outdoor industry. With, people like Backcountry and focused on some of the standards that would be used to exchange POS and catalog information and stuff.
My experience with Amazon taught me one thing. It was basically where we were going to go in the next decade, which was mostly online informed shopping. People were going to do almost all their shopping online. And without any local presence, it was increasingly cutting off local stores from any type of visibility.
Locally was founded focused on that one consumer behavior. It became obvious by the late two-thousands shopper behavior was moving mostly to online discovery. Things like open table and, ticketmaster.com and, Airbnb, that was the inevitable future of retail. People would do most of their shopping online and for lucky local stores, they would be able to get some referrals from maybe their vendors or something locally.
And now we do all sorts of stuff. Since we founded the company in 2000 and launched in 2014.
What brought Envoy and Locally together? Jon: It was through research that we were doing for product development. To make our platform a little more retailer-centric. Something that we do at Envoy as a part of our product development process has always been a research component, a really big research component. We’re not really inventing things and putting them out there and saying, Hey, do you like it? We do all the research upfront, figure out what people want. It sounds simple, but it’s hard to do a really good job of research. And part of what led us to locally was we asked retailers, “what do you want, what are you having issues with?” One of the things that came back really strong all the time was we’re having trouble replenishing easily.
Essentially there are open spots on my store shelf too often. And what can we do about that? One of the things we started looking at was how can we get their on-hand information inside of our brand B2B portals, so that the rep c
