The following interview is a conversation we had with Maggie Adhami-Boynton, CEO & Founder of ShopThing, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $10 Million Raised to Power the Future of Live Video Commerce
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Thanks for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
For sure. So I am a 15 plus year tech veteran, have been working in technology from marketing advertising agencies to telecommunications, all the way up to startups that built mobile applications for really big brands. Never worked a day in my life in retail, believe it or not, outside of that summer that I worked when I was 16 at a retail store. But outside of that, never professionally worked in retail. Just had this drive and passion for fashion and retail and all things style, which has landed me very fully at shopping.
Brett
Amazing. And two questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a CEO and Founder. First one is, what CEO do you admire and what do you admire about them?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Yeah, that’s an excellent question. I would say it probably changes often because there are so many CEOs for us to admire, especially in tech. The one that I’m going to say is not a tech CEO, but it’s Sarah Blakely, Founder of Spanx. Her story is incredible. She’s a woman with no funding, no real experience building a retail product, but she was able to create a billion dollar brand against all odds and did all on her own and had an incredible exit. And she was really great to the people that worked for her, worked with her partners. And so she’s definitely a Founder that I looked up to.
Brett
Nice. She’s so cool. I follow her husband a lot and indirectly get to see a lot of her stuff, and they’re super funny together. I love their relationship. It’s really fun to watch.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Totally. And just so genuine and lovely and just yeah. I can’t say enough good things about Sarah Blakely. She’s definitely up there.
Brett
Yeah. I think two days ago, the husband was doing a tour of the White House, and I guess he’s trying to convince Sarah to run for president. So he was in the Situation Room and held up a note card that said, sarah, please run for president, something like that. So they’re kind of like trolling each other and just so funny to watch.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
I cannot vote for her because I’m Canadian, but I would change citizenship just to vote for Sarah Blakely.
Brett
I love it. What about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this can be one of the classic business books or a book that just really changed how you personally view the world and think about the world?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
I am such a book nerd, especially when it comes to I don’t love fiction books. I really love to read books. Startup books specifically. I would say Shoe Dog, which is a Phil Knight story. The Founder of Nike was a big one for me. Never split the difference. Love Chris Boss. But I’ve literally read them all. From super bump to billion dollar loser to the story of Facebook and Uber. I just love reading about other tech entrepreneur stories. How they rose, how they fell, what to do, what not to do. I find it really inspiring.
Brett
I guess. I was speaking with earlier today, mentioned Shoe Dog, and then also gave me the epic news that there’s a movie coming out in April about the story, which I didn’t know about. Did you know that?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
No. And I love that book. So I’m pumped. It was such a great story.
Brett
I know, I feel like we’re in the peak era right now too, of just entrepreneur documentaries and TV shows and movies. It’s like all of these classic books, like all the ones that you just mentioned, those are books I’ve read as well. And now they’re all like coming out of Netflix or HBO. It’s exciting times for entrepreneur content.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
It really is. Definitely more so now than when I was growing up. So I think for the future entrepreneurs out there’s a lot to be inspired by.
Brett
When I was 20, I was watching these just crappy documentaries like you would kind of watch in school that was like the content if you really wanted to learn about entrepreneurship. But now it’s just insane.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Exactly. Yeah. Totally agree.
Brett
Now let’s talk about what you’re building there. So can you just take us back to the early days and talk us through the origin story?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Of course. So, as I mentioned, I had spent at the time, probably about twelve ish years in technology. My previous gig to this, I worked building mobile apps for Canada’s largest banks, quick service restaurants, lottery loyalty, what have you. So a lot of time building these incredible mobile products. Obviously knew tech very well. As I mentioned, never really worked in fashion or retail. But I did have a blog at the time as a micro influencer, and I did that. That was my passion. It was kind of my pastime. I would go home at nights after I put my kids to bed, and that’s what I would do. And so one day I was like when habit. As I was building some content for my Instagram account, I came across this lady in New York. And she would scour the streets of Manhattan, go into just the most incredible little boutiques and sample sales and warehouse sales and what have you, and she would broadcast to her followers the things that she would find, and she would allow you to purchase them.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
So in order to purchase, you would send her an Instagram DM, and then she’d ask us some questions. And very long story short, she would collect payment and then send you the product. And so I became fascinated with this concept of being able to buy something from New York City that I otherwise wouldn’t have access to. And I tried to buy something from her, but it didn’t work out. So, as a product marketer and a technologist, the first thing I did was, okay, a, there has to be a better way. This Instagram back and forth was just the biggest nightmare. And B, there must be somebody else doing this. And so I did a whole bunch of research. It landed me in Asia not physically in Asia, but on the interwebs, I came across this huge trend in Asia, and it was actually Taobao. I landed on the Taobao site, watching these Asian influencers sell everything from banana holders to cupcakes to cars to houses to clothes like, literally everything and anything.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
And it was like watching QVC but on mobile. Super addictive. They spoke really fast. I couldn’t understand a single word. But things were flying emojis, and it was just like the most engaging thing I had done in a long time. And, of course, nothing existed like it in North America. So then it became my life mission, and actually, I got to it was a privilege to be able to marry my passion with my vocation and be able to bring this new technology into North America.
Brett
Wow. Super cool story. And what about the product experience for the brands? Could you walk us through what it looks like and maybe share a few of the brands that you’re working with today?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Yeah, for sure. So, we’re actually a marketplace, which means we pair brands with influencers to host these really incredibly engaging live shopping events. And the reason I’m sort of telling you this nuance is because we don’t actually give our technology to the brands and allow them to live stream their own events. We bring the talent. We host the events. We do the whole thing for you, and we bring the audience as well. And so, for our brand, it’s a really seamless, easy, nondisruptive experience. They literally just give us a place to shoot, give us the inventory and the content, and we’ll bring up team. We shoot it all in the span of a few hours, and then we’re out of your hair, and we sell all your stuff. And some of the brands we work with. We work with luxury brands like a Jimmy Choos or a Whitesman, all the way down to some contemporary brands like a Bash or a Ted Baker Maj or the Town of brands that we work with.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
But we did start inputting in luxury. That is our focus today. We’ve introduced pre Loved this year and are working on bringing out new categories like Beauty and home.
Brett
And is it all about performance marketing for them? And are they just looking to get sales, or is there also an element of brand marketing here as well?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Totally, and I’m really glad that you asked that question. It is absolutely both. So I think the way that most brands initially do it is we are an alternate distribution channel for them where they can sell off their goods, but then what slowly happens is they realize that we are actually also a brand awareness channel. So, as an example, Bash was an early brand that we work with here in Canada. And Bash is this Parisian brand, really well known in Paris, had just come into the North American market a few years prior to working with us. And in Canada, they were brand new. I think they had one store set up and not a lot of brand awareness here. I don’t think any of our customers at the time even knew who Bash was. And so over, I would probably say like two or three events.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
What our client would tell us is that people would walk into the store with our screenshots and say, we want this. We know that this event is not live anymore on ShopThing, but we want to buy this. Can we buy this? And we never even knew about this brand before it was introduced on ShopThing. And conversely, we saw that in our sales. Each time we hosted a Bash event, our sales would exponentially increase because our audience was now learning about this new, incredible brand. So it does become sort of twofold for us.
Brett
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Brett
Was reading on your website and it was talking about how Deloitte has said, this is the next evolution in ecommerce. I think the number there was like $125,000,000,000 industry, and it’s coming to North America. Now, why do you think it was slower to come to North America? Why did this really get its start in the APAC region?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Yeah, also a great question. So the Asian consumer is, first of all, their adoption of technology far surpasses our adoption of technology. When you look at the Asian market and their use of super app well before we’re talking like ten years ago, their adoption was far surpasses what we do here, or at least the technology that we adopt in North America. And their consumer consumes tech in a different way and they consume content in a different way. So they invented live shopping. It wasn’t invented by myself. I really just borrowed the trend in Asia and so it’s done exceptionally well. There even the fact that we’ve been in North America for the last three years, it’s exploded. It went from 19 billion in 2019 in Asia to 530,000,000,000 today. We don’t have that same type of hyper growth in North America. Again, my hypotheses is that we are a different consumer and we consume content in a different way.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Plus there’s also more competition in North America. In Asia, there’s always this one monopoly that takes over and that’s just the way it is. But I think we’re going to get there, and we’re getting there quicker than we think we will. It’s just we’re just a different consumer. And shopping as a company has thought very mindfully about how we introduce live shopping into North America and thought a lot about our consumer and that they are different than the Asian consumer. So we’ve done things with our user experience that’s different, with the way we offer our products that’s different because we want to cater to this audience.
Brett
And what’s the right term here? Am I saying it wrong? When I introduced you as a live video commerce? Like, is it live video commerce? Is it live shopping? I feel like there’s probably like five or ten different terms that I hear, and I’m never sure what the actual proper term is.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
It’s both. You can say either. There’s live video commerce, live commerce, live shopping, l commerce. It all live video stream. It all kind of means the same thing.
Brett
Got it? All right. That’s a relief to know that I haven’t been getting it wrong and I’m not missing out on all these different industries. It’s all one industry. So I’d love to talk a little bit about that competitive landscape in the US. Because I do see that there’s a lot of companies that have raised funding in recent years for this idea. And just in general, there’s a lot of buzz around this idea now. So can you just talk us through what the competitive landscape looks like in North America?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Yeah. There are certainly a few players in North America we saw in 2020. Once the world shut down or post the world shutting down and everything starting to Open Back up, a ton of competitors entered into the market because obviously the best time for this type of tech is when nobody is actually going into stores and Ecommerce just kind of falls black when you think about the evolution in every other industry. There hasn’t been an evolution in retail since Ecom, which is over 20 years ago. So it kind of made sense. It was really ripe for disruption. Lots of players came into the space, and a lot have since kind of left. There are a few big players, us being one of them, in the North American space, and it’s really exciting. We all kind of have our own little verticals. There’s one that focuses on collectibles and one that focuses on working with small businesses.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
There are actually a few decent sized players that do offer the technology and allow brands to license it. We’ve just taken a different approach where we believe we should own the entire flow. And by we, I mean our content creators and our influencers. We are kind of a mix between social commerce and ecommerce in that way because we do use content creators, but we do believe that Gen Z likes to buy from influencers and content creators. That’s where we see the future of marketing, advertising. And so that’s kind of what we’ve bet big on.
Brett
And whenever you’re building a marketplace, and this is something that other founders have told me, who have come on, who are building marketplaces is, you always face this chicken and egg problem of which side of the marketplace do you focus on first. So how did you address that problem? In the early days, I would say.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
That we did not actually address it. The market told us what it wanted, so went out, did some shopping. We have a three sided marketplace. We have consumers, we have our influencers or content creators that actually create the content, and then we have brands. And so in the early days, we would just go out and walk into store and shop whatever we wanted to. We thought were going to have a consumer problem. But what ended up happening is we kind of just kept going viral. Our content on Instagram went viral. Our content on TikTok went viral. We blew up in a few cities across North America. And so then we realized, all right, we organically brought in the customers. We didn’t have that problem. We had influencers galore out on the streets. We didn’t have that problem. And so we let the marketplace tell us what problem we had at that time or what part of the marketplace we need to focus more on.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
And then in the early days, it really was brand, and it was a lot of knocking on doors and trying to get people to understand what were doing. It was a new trend. Not a lot of retailers were really up for that type of discovery of this new technology. With us, it’s gone a lot easier, luckily for us. But in the early days, it just organically was brands. And then once brands I like to think of it as levers once brands got really strong, then at some point it was, okay, we don’t have enough content creators, so now that’s a part of the marketplace we have to focus on. And then once that was really strong, it was like, okay, now we have enough brands and content brands paired with enough content and app. Now we need to work on bringing in more consumers. So it’s a constant lever that we need to take a look at and monitor and figure out which side is the one that’s kind of lacking.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
But it literally evolves on a quarterly.
Brett
Basis, makes a lot of sense. And are there any metrics or numbers that you can share that just highlight some of the growth that you’re seeing?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Yeah, I can tell you in our first year, which is that COVID year we grew 10,000 X and then the year after that we five X. That growth last year was a great year for us, even considering the macro factors. So lots of explosive growth for us. And it was really just about how do we continue taking over the North American space, working with more brands, obviously, working with more content creators and influencers, less about convincing people of our tech now, which is great, or of the phenomenon, and more just about scale, which has its own challenges, by the way.
Brett
Let’s talk about some of those challenges. So I’m sure you’ve experienced a lot of challenges as you’ve been building this company up. But if were to pick out one challenge that you’ve experienced and then you overcame, what’s that challenge and how do you overcome it?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
I would say our biggest challenge because were introducing a brand new category that, first of all, no one has ever done it before. So finding people that would be appropriate, even if they were content creators, influence, they’d be appropriate for live streaming, live shopping, live selling, whatever you want to call it. That in itself was a challenge. Trying to convince brands to work with us in this new thing that they’d never heard about before was a challenge. I mean, I’m sure every innovator, if you think about the Ubers of the world, the Instacarts of the world, the Airbnb’s of the world, when you’re creating a new market or a new category or bring disruption into a new industry, that really is your biggest challenge. It’s trying to get people to understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, knocking on doors, trying to break barriers.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
I know it’s not one single challenge, but I would say that was our biggest challenge in the early years and I think time helped us overcome it a bit, as well as COVID, as Clappy, as COVID was, as a massive accelerant in tour business, people weren’t able to go into store. And as I mentioned, ecommerce leaves a lot to be desired. We have influencers that not only will curate a whole look for you, but they’ll put it on their body. They’ll tell you how it fits, how it feels. You’ll get to see more detail than you would with a static image on an Ecommerce site. So people really loved that convenience of feeling like you’re shopping in person but never having to leave your home. So even though we didn’t do anything to overcome it really was a COVID in time. It was something that were obviously able to overcome.
Brett
And if we just zoom out and take a look at this category, what do you think the category is going to look like three to five years from today? And then what’s Ecommerce going to look like in three to five years from today? What’s that experience going to be like for me as a consumer, for consumers in general?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
I will tell you a lot of brands in the early days and probably still today, were scared of what were doing because they thought that we are trying to replace them. And when I say that, I mean physical retail. And I will tell you, I don’t think that there is ever going to be a world where anybody will replace Physical Retail, at least not in the near future, certainly not in the next three to five years. What I think the future looks like in our space, and I’ll just talk broadly and generally about retail is I think there will be a really nice world where you have both read Physical Retail, Ecommerce, and Live Shopping. And I believe most brands, if not all, will find a way to play in each of those domains. And that will be what Omnichannel is today. Omnichannel means something different.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
I think in the future, Omnichannel will mean that you also have live streaming and live commerce. If I’m going to be really crazy, I’ll tell you my vision is every store, physical retail store, has some sort of studio where a live streamer can just pop in and work like a gig worker would. So instead of driving Uber, you will be a live shopper. And physical retail stores will have these really cool studios that you can pop into and shoot your content in. I think that’s where I see the future going again, as it is a bit out there, and it’s more five year than three year, but I think that we will evolve to a place where we get closer to that.
Brett
Wow, that’s super exciting. And what about for ShopThing? What’s that future going to look like for you? And what role are you going to play in shaping that future?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Yeah, I think that we’re well on our way to, especially in our work that we do with influencers and content creators to allow them to monetize their following, their reach in a different way. So today, if you think about the traditional way that influencers work with brands, brand will send you a product. You will do a photo shoot or create a video or Reel, what have you, and then you will spend all this time editing it. You’ll publish it, you’ll put up an affiliate link. Maybe somebody will buy it, maybe they won’t, who knows? And then the brand may pay you a commission sale. What we want to do is allow these incredible influencers that already create this great content to be able to monetize their following in a different way, where I don’t have to do all of that work. I can walk into the store or be hooked up with a brand or whatever that looks like and actually host a live shopping event that will lead to direct sales.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
In that event, it’s easier to track, it’s easier to monetize for the influencer. You don’t have to wait. You don’t have to do all this prework and editing and XYZ. And so we want to allow influencers and content creators a different avenue of monetizing their following.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Maggie. Unfortunately, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go?
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Yeah. Download our app. It’s in the iOS app store called ShopThing. Or follow us along on Instagram at ShopThing live.
Brett
Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to share a story and talk about everything that you’re building. This has been a lot of fun, super interesting conversation and hope to have you back on in a couple of years to talk about everything that’s happened.
Maggie Adhami-Boynton
Thank you, Brett. It was lovely being here.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Brett
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Brett
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Brett
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