Hello, happy Sunday, and welcome to my weekend musings. I’m starting to realize that I’m getting too busy to do these every weekend so I’m going to shoot for getting at least one musing done each month, hence moving from weekend musings to monthly musings. This would have been my 75th weekend musings so rather than celebrate the anniversary of an old tradition, I’m okay celebrating the introduction of a new one.
So let’s get started.
The highlight of this past week, and really what the whole team has been working very hard on for a number of weeks now is the Shop.org conference in Philadelphia. There are three major conference in the retail eCommerce world, Shop.org, IRCE, and eTail West. Conferences like Shop.org bring together decision-makers from just about every retailer you could imagine, from Nike to H&M, The Gap to Abercrombie, they’re all here.
We set a very aggressive goal for the number of meetings we wanted to have and the companies we wanted to meet with. I’m incredibly proud of how hard the whole team worked from the sales organization, to product management, to engineering, everyone came together to make this a very high-impact event for the company.
It also marks our first time exhibiting on the showfloor at an event like this, so here it is, forever immortalized, Fashion Metric’s first booth setup:
Yes, that is a shiny black mannequins draped with measuring tape, and yes, all the measurements do correspond to real measurements that our algorithms can output. Over 5,000 people attended the show this year, our calendar was booked all day every day, it was a great show, and completely exhausting so it’s been nice to catch-up on some must needed rest this weekend.
Of course, while in Philadelphia I did have to run up the Rocky steps and take this picture:
So what’s next for October? In a week we’ll be heading to FounderCon (read more about last year’s FounderCon), an annual conference that Techstars puts on for founders that have gone through the program. Daina and I are really looking forward to the event, starting a venture-funded startup is fun, exciting, exhilarating, and also very different from what most of our friends and family are doing or have done in their life. Sharing experience with other founders is one of the most strategically valuable things we can do, especially when we are connecting-up with startups that might be a year or two ahead of us.
Techstars has done a great job of building a small group of highly qualified founders, investors, and advisors. It’s harder to get into Techstars than Havard, but that’s also why it’s the #1 global startup accelerator. I’m proud to have gone through Techstars and really look forward to getting together with old friends and new in Boulder.
After Boulder we’ll be heading to Lugano Switzerland for a Body Scanning conference and to meet with some new potential partners in Europe. As a SaaS company we aren’t limited by where our office is located which means we can do business all over the world. We’ll be spending some time in Milan, one of the biggest fashion hub’s in the world, and a first for both of us.
It’s been an exciting month so far and I look forward to the month ahead!
Photo Credit: Alex Switzerland via Compfight cc
