The Story of Violet: Building the Infrastructure Layer for Next-Generation Commerce

Most startup origin stories begin with a lightbulb moment. But Violet’s began with a failure – specifically, Brandon Schulz‘s unsuccessful attempt to build integrated checkout functionality at his previous company. That experience revealed a fundamental problem in ecommerce: the infrastructure needed for modern commerce experiences simply didn’t exist.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Brandon shared how that initial failure led to Violet’s creation. “That’s kind of actually why I started the company,” he explains. “I had to build this in the first company I built and just failed miserably and realized that you can’t do both. You can’t build a threads competitor and also try to build a world class ecommerce infrastructure.”

What Brandon and his co-founder Ren discovered was a critical gap in the market. As social commerce and creator-driven marketplaces exploded, companies needed a way to connect with multiple ecommerce platforms simultaneously. The existing solutions were manual, inefficient, and prone to error.

Take Throne, one of Violet’s early customers. Their team was manually processing every order: “They were doing this for every single product and every single order that came in. Right. Like essentially a mechanical Turk approach to handling a version of integrated checkout.” This manual process was not only inefficient but also created additional transaction fees and security concerns.

But building the solution wasn’t easy. For four years, Violet operated in relative obscurity, perfecting their product while facing constant rejection from investors. As Brandon recalls, “We didn’t have much of a past in fundraising and even don’t have much of a super compelling resume on paper. But we knew we had a great product and we knew we could build great product.”

The breakthrough came when they found the sweet spot between product-market fit and go-to-market strategy. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, they focused on building a robust API that could handle the complexities of multi-platform ecommerce integration. The market responded enthusiastically: “We tripled our customer base in the last twelve months or so.”

Today, Violet takes “all of the ecommerce platforms out there and the data coming from their APIs and unifies that into a single pipe and format.” This allows companies to focus on building great customer experiences without getting bogged down in the complexities of ecommerce integration.

Looking ahead, Brandon sees a future where commerce becomes increasingly distributed. “I think the world five years from now will have a lot more choice and a lot more touch points for ecommerce,” he predicts. “I don’t think we will be so distributed of having to go to millions of different ecommerce stores, having individual accounts for every single one of them.”

This vision extends beyond just streamlining existing commerce patterns. Brandon sees opportunities in emerging technologies like generative AI for messaging and product recommendations, shoppable TV, and augmented reality. With Apple’s recent AR announcements, he believes we’re “definitely on kind of the beginning of that curve.”

For Violet, success isn’t about building the next big marketplace or social commerce platform. Instead, they’re focused on creating the infrastructure that enables others to innovate. As Brandon puts it, they want to “continue to expand and redistribute the way ecommerce works out into a whole new generation and phase of innovators to make shopping easier and better for everyone.”

It’s a vision that turned four years of investor rejection into an advantage, allowing Violet to build something truly foundational for the future of commerce. Sometimes, the best disruption doesn’t come from building a flashy new marketplace, but from solving the underlying infrastructure problems that hold an entire industry back.