Brewing Up B2B Success: Lessons from Jamie Golde’s Career Journey

If we would have picked Shopify, there's nobody to help us fit in and it would have just been, this is what you get, this is what you bought. Where Vetex has really been a true partner in helping us take our B2B industry into the platform and to help us thread our own DNA into our web experience. Welcome to Bitex Live, the podcast where digital transformation gets a reality check. I am Santiago Naranjo from Bitex and this is where we break the rules. We write the playbook and hear from leaders who are actually getting results. Let's get into it. I love to meet people during the podcast because I think it's our first time that we are going to get to know each other. I was reading your background and oh my God, this is a professional that is really like an expert B2B and commerce in our industry. And it's an honor and a pleasure to have you here. Can you please introduce yourself to the audience and let you know a little bit who you are so all of us can get in context. I'm Jamie Goldie. I work for RAR bsg, which is a company that supplies craft brewing ingredients to all the brewers out there. We have a customer base of large national brewers as well as the small neighborhood size. Before working at RAWR bsg, I worked in the hospitality industry. Hospitality, doing E commerce for them. So nice hotel reservations and that whole website. And before that, I worked for BestBuy.com for about 10 years. Wow. Yeah. A lot of things to share with us. Jamie, why are you in Sao Paulo? Your first time being in a BTEX day? Can you tell us a little bit about how are you feeling? I had no idea what to expect and this is absolutely amazing. Yesterday, walking in, I was just overwhelmed by the scale of everything and the number of people I've met. How many people are Even here is 25,000 people in 1 million square feet of event. It's massive. How do you imagine that VTEX can be like this? Or you were just expecting like a meet and greet event? I imagine something much smaller. As a company that's hosting an event, I didn't know. I had no idea it would be this big. Yeah, that is good. That is good. Normally people that travel from Germany, uk, Africa, United States to BTEX day, they say like, oh, if we knew that you were so big will be easier for everyone. So yeah, I think that allow us to show our roots, but also our vision to be an ecosystem to enable business around the world and to be able to connect professional companies, vendors, the whole ecosystem, even competitors can be here and everybody is welcome to grow together and to create an industry. So let's start with some questions. Why did you choose Bitex? What are the good things that you love about Bitex? What they think that you need to give me feedback and say, shanti, please improve on that. Yes, we are going to do that live. So don't worry. It's actually a really good question. My company selected Vetex before I even joined. So now vtex had to resell to me because I was like, why Vetex? It's a fair question. Yeah, it's a fair question. We don't have the Orana 1 jet there. So good professionals who challenge all when they start to school. Yes. So I asked a lot of questions and I was very critical actually. But I learned the knowledge and skills, the willingness to help solve our problems without saying sorry, you just need to fit into the the box. There's a lot of the more Shopify, for example. If we would have picked Shopify, there is nobody to help us fit in and it would have just been this is what you get, this is what you buy. Where VTechs has really been a true partner in helping us take our B2B industry into the platform and to help us thread our own DNA into our web experience. I don't know if I should be sad or happy because majority of the customer that I'm doing the interview these two days, they always tell me, santi, I am with Bitex for their team, for their culture. Because more than a vendor, you are a partner that even your product maybe is not perfect. You don't make us just fill into a box and let us go. You are there to help us to grow. So I will need to double check my strategy. I was talking with my team. Maybe we need to invest even more in our team, even more in our people because this is what we our customer value the most. My entire team was new to E commerce in general for the most part. So we had to have very basic conversations when we're thinking about what is the customer experience that we're trying to go after here. What is the customer segment that we want to serve with the website. Once we got that narrowed down then it was getting into peeling back the onion in our own operation and figuring out what can VTEX connect to for this information. Do we need to build something? And Vetex was in conversations that probably a normal company wouldn't be a part of, but we really needed that expertise. Nice. We are trying to bring talent to Our customers and in this area of AI, everyone want to automate and just automate. But the human can share knowledge, the human can be there, solve some inquires and some to even challenge the status quo. To help even the companies to challenge and to be able to grow. So it's an important realization that you are setting here and what we need to improve. Do not be kind, please. I've given this feedback already. The content management system we're using. I heard there's a new one, but it's in the fast store. Yes, and we're on IO. It is bad. I recognize it is bad. Yeah, but maybe that means we should look at other choices. I don't know. I always been open about our composable and complete offer. Of course we want to have the best possible model on each of our commerce architecture. You know, you want to have the best chicao, you want to have the best OMs, the best CMS, the best promotion model. Sometimes we are able to make. Sometimes the product need to catch up. Yeah, but to be able to be like to offer more than a software, this is how we deliver the composable solutions of our clients. When they need to maybe find another solution, they can do it even without leaving vtex. Just like doing a M match on what is the best architecture that we can offer to them. So I'm more than happy and more than comfortable you choosing another player for that specific model that allow us to fly, allow us to have a better experience, avoid noise inside your company and accelerate. I am fully aligned with you. The other one is the catalog we're using out of the box. It's very limiting, I think for our merchandiser who has a lot of ideas on what she would like to bring to life in the site. We also recognize our catalog is only like 2,000 products. So how many scales do you have? 2,000. 2,000. So it's not a massive. It's not so big. Yeah, no, but we sell a lot of one for instance, our base malt, it's called RAR2 Row. That one we sell the most of like pallets, you know, a customer will order 30, 40 bags of just that. So we don't need a big deep catalog. Yeah, but what we do need is a place to store all of the data about that product. So if for a moment in time we are short on inventory, what is the closest alternative to be able to substitute in and have that customer so that they continue to purchase. That is fundamental and good feedback. I think we are moving forward on the Catalog. I will try to pay a visit to all of you and maybe to do a demo. I think we will have a good surprise on that. On the cms maybe it will take longer. But on the catalog maybe we can surprise you. Then let's go to your experience. Best Buy, the reference on commerce and retail, not only United States, but in the world. Can you share us a little bit of the insight? How is to work on this type of big corporation? What was your main challenge as a professional and how was all this revolution on. You need to in that moment to fight with Amazon Target. You were there on the, you know, the center of the huracan commerce. Can you tell us a little bit? When I first started, it was early mid 2000s. Our website at that moment when we needed to update the homepage, we still wrote HTML. I can imagine that. And we would print it out and post it on the wall for our executive team to approve it before we published Quickly we evolved out of that right to new platforms and I was part of migrating and reconstructing information to go into those platforms. Can I ask to which platform at that time we built our own. Oh my God, you are rebels. I felt like I was working with some of the most skilled and talented people. Yeah, I always felt like the dumb person in the room. It's like wow, learning so much. After we launched that platform a few years then they decided let's try Adobe. How was the experience trying to take our fully custom to US system into that case. Best buy should be millions of SKUs. I don't know, like millions, millions of SKUs variables and died to fit in inside Adobe. That should be a nightmare process. It was a challenge. And the. If you. And don't get me wrong, I love Adobe. They have an amazing product. I admire the company, amazing team there. But that migration should be something that. Yeah, it was a lot. Best Buy. I don't even know if they still do but at that time they still were selling music, you know, CDs. Yes. Movies, DVDs. Yes. So that made the catalog massive. There was so much to migrate. It felt like we would never get done with just migrating Adobe. I think we overwhelmed the platform. It was slow for us. We gave a lot of feedback on customizations we would want and they're just like get in line guys. We don't customize Adobe for you. That is the good part of this type of huge corporation, that you get what you see. Nothing additional to that. They did allow us to submit ideas of things they could put in their Roadmap to better meet our needs. So we went that route a lot. That's good. Let me enter to a little bit of a personal concept. It is obvious that you are a powerful and successful woman in the commerce industry in the United States. And it is not so common to see women in your position. So I would love to allow yourself to share some advice to all the young talented woman that want to grow, want to drive in an industry that normally is full of men that is not so kind. Sometimes you are really, really like someone that they can follow and they can see in you what they are dreaming. So can you share some words for all of them? When I was young, Best Buy actually is a great company for developing and helping people like me who are aspiring to things. They provided leadership training and a lot of professional development to help that. To me that was invaluable in my journey. And at that company everyone was an equal seat at the table. So when I took that experience to Radisson, which Radisson Hotel group is still similar with a lot of men dominating the industry, I had the confidence to sit at the table and challenge and ask. I don't actually know how or why, but somewhere along the journey I just decided to get comfortable in my own skin. And if I don't challenge the norm, I will always wonder. I've always lived trying to have no regrets. You know, it's kind of my thing like make sure I don't leave anything on the table. I think you are an inspiration not for only for everyone, but for everybody around you because your career is not an easy one and you challenge the status quo in technology, in retail, in gender, in a lot of topics. And let me just recognize and thankful for giving us the space to talk and to be here with you. So let's continue with other topics but I wanted to be precise that we admire you and we want to allow everybody of Bittexers to follow you and see you. Let's go to the B2B Arena. I'm not common as a female in that arena as well. B2B is a business that in the past was only about, you know, a spreadsheet, excel, maybe asap like rules was not easy to do business around B2B on in fact B2B one was of the type of business that challenged the Internet because big company were still doing business of B2B without Internet. And I think still they're young. It's still a little bit like that. It's a layer of the world that's built on relationships, handshakes and relationships drives a lot of that business. Trying to help people see that you are one salesperson, you're exhausted, right? But technology can help you. Let me help you. So having challenging conversations and finding small ways to make that difference is kind of what it's been about in the journey. Even with this e commerce project in solving some of the. How can the website get information that's currently not in a system? I can't count how many conversations we had about that. But what we ended up doing is having to put it in a system. And the journey to do that created immediate wins for the business because we've now automated or simplified something that people were calling and emailing and doing all sorts of things to make a one second task happen. Agreed. Now I want an advice from you. If you were the owner of Bitex, sea level of vtex, what will you do to enter and to scale in United States, North America, Canada? What will be your next move to focus on and to grow? I was actually thinking about that the whole time here because every time I'm at an industry event and they ask me about what platform and I say vtex, they say what is that? Can you spell it? That is a good, a good sentence for a campaign. What is vtex? Can you spell it? Yeah, because they want to look it up. So then I try to explain the closest thing that an American business would recognize and that's Shopify. I think there's a lot of similarities where it's an the platform has everything or some, you know, depending on what you want to use. And then they're like, well then why don't you use Shopify? It's a fair question. And don't get me wrong, Shopify have a lot of amazing things and shout out to all the team of Shopify and their clients and the ecosystem. But I think we have different ICPs. I agree, I think majority of the people see as a competitor. And don't get me wrong, I believe that Shopify helped so much the industry and a lot of entrepreneurs to grow. I think they're what they deliver value in our icp. I think we have a different ICP that we deliver a different value on even different markets. But I always say Vetex has all those capabilities but they're willing to listen to you and make sure how you're using the tools and is going to maximize value. And their team will put things in the roadmap and make adjustments based on our feedback and us challenging you and seeing you. VTechs evolve in real time is really cool. I just want to see you guys have a heavier presence in the us. I don't know how to help. You are already doing it. Thank you for your advice, for trusting us, for challenging us, for giving feedback, for recognizing our team. I think this is a good way to close our first podcast. I hope that we can have a second episode. I really enjoy a lot of our conversation. Very happy and excited to have you here in Brazil. Hope to see you soon. This episode of Bitex LIVE was brought to you by Bitex, the digital commerce platform for bold leaders. Head to bitex.com to see how we help businesses scale fast, flex smart and let the AI power future of commerce. If you like it what you hear, follow the show on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen. Because in this space, speed isn't a luxury, it is your edge.