I'm Chris.
I work in ecommerce, although after enough time in ecommerce that starts to mean quite a lot more than running a website.
I've spent more than a decade in B2B and B2C ecommerce, from trading and customer experience to headless platforms, migrations and integrations. I've led teams, agencies and product roadmaps, and worked through the product, pricing and customer data that make the whole thing work.
That probably explains this site.
Excuse This is where I keep things I find interesting enough to look at properly.
Sometimes that's a business or brand I can't quite make sense of. Sometimes it's something I've come across through work. Sometimes it's an idea I want to test before convincing myself it's brilliant. And sometimes I get annoyed enough with a problem that I build something.
Most of it sits somewhere around commerce, brands, technology and business, but I'm not particularly interested in forcing everything into a category.
I've written a lot over the years. Some of it is useful. Some of it reflects what I was interested in at the time.
I'm increasingly interested in showing the work as it happens. Writing, research, tools, experiments and projects. Some things will go nowhere. Hopefully a few won't.
A few things I keep coming back to
- Do the maths.
- It has become far too easy to test the basic economics of an idea to rely entirely on vibes.
- Then distrust the maths a little.
- Great brands and strange businesses occasionally work when the spreadsheet says they should not.
- Useful beats impressive.
- Especially when it comes to technology and AI.
- Operating changes the answer.
- Things look different once real customers, people, systems and costs get involved.
- Not every observation needs to become a business.
- Sometimes it is just interesting.
These are working assumptions, not commandments. They can change over time.
Worked with
I'm interested in what happens after the demo: finding the right product, getting pricing and stock right, and whether the team can run it all without a daily rescue mission. These are some of the platforms I've worked with along the way.
- Commerce
- Magento / Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, commercetools
- Product & content
- Akeneo, Contentstack
- Search & AI
- Algolia, Google Vertex AI
- Customer & marketing
- Salesforce, Klaviyo, Emarsys, Dotdigital
- Business systems
- MYOB Exo, Sage 300
- Data & cloud
- GA4, Google Tag Manager, Azure
Professional context
My work spans ecommerce trading, digital product ownership and platform delivery. You can find the career version of me on LinkedIn and the things I'm building here.