The Story of Chord Commerce: From DTC Operators to Commerce Data Pioneers

Sometimes the biggest innovations start with the smallest hacks. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Bryan Mahoney shared how a PowerPoint animation side hustle in college evolved into a journey through the evolution of digital commerce, ultimately leading to the creation of Chord Commerce.

The College Hustle That Started It All

In 1997, while studying at McGill University, Bryan and a classmate discovered they could hack PowerPoint to create animations that wowed their classmates. As Bryan recalls: “When we first got up in front of the class and delivered this presentation, people were blown away. And our classmates came to us and said, could we actually pay you to do something similar to make our presentations look really great?”

This entrepreneurial spark coincided with the early days of the internet boom. As Bryan explains: “Back in 97 and 98, the Internet was really becoming a thing, and businesses were looking to get online and establish some amount of profile.” The PowerPoint hackers quickly evolved into web developers, parlaying their presentation skills into building online presences for small businesses.

The Glossier Chapter

Fast forward to 2014, when a pivotal phone call changed everything. Henry Davis, one of the first employees at what would become Glossier, reached out about building their foundational e-commerce platform. What started as a client relationship evolved into something more significant. As Bryan describes: “I remember one day debriefing on a candidate that I’d recently interviewed with Henry, and we agreed that it wasn’t the candidate they wanted to hire. And he made this joke, boy, it’d be great if we could hire you. And then we’d both laugh uncomfortably.”

That uncomfortable laugh turned into a serious conversation, leading Bryan to leave his agency and join Glossier as CTO, where he spent four and a half years building the technology that would help define the DTC era.

The Pivot to Platform

After Glossier, Bryan and Henry Davis started Arfa, launching two DTC brands: Hiki, an all-gender sweat brand, and State of Menopause. But running these brands led to an important realization. As Bryan explains: “Perhaps the real value in what we had created was in the technology stack and a better way to monetize it, instead of through the creation of our own brands, was to make it available to other founders who were looking for similar solutions.”

This insight led to the creation of Chord Commerce, initially launching as a full commerce platform before focusing specifically on the data infrastructure layer. As Bryan notes: “Recently, we have decided to focus almost exclusively on that latter part, the commerce data platform, where we’re more agnostic to your storefront technology and your order management system or commerce back office technology.”

The Future of Commerce

Looking ahead, Bryan sees commerce becoming increasingly distributed and experiential: “Commerce is really a part of like all of our experiences. And the more we interact, the more commerce lives everywhere, the more you as a customer, your data lives everywhere.”

This vision challenges conventional wisdom about attribution and customer acquisition. As Bryan explains: “There’s sort of like this fascination around attribution, like pixel perfect attribution… It’s kind of like a false promise. It’s about showing up consistently where your customer is and giving them a really great product and a great experience.”

What does this mean for brands? According to Bryan: “Nothing makes me laugh more than when people like say direct to consumer is dead. I’m like, direct to consumer is just getting started. If you’re not collecting great data, if you’re not leveraging your own channels to learn more about your customers, then you’re going to be left behind. I just don’t think you can build a great and durable brand without doing that.”

From PowerPoint animations to the future of commerce data infrastructure, Chord’s story demonstrates how deep operational experience, combined with the ability to spot emerging market needs, can lead to transformative innovation in retail technology.