A Conversation with Rui Ewald of Reflektion
Rui Ewald is Sr. Director, Product Management at Reflektion, an AI-powered personalization platform for digital marketing.
He shares some of his experience on the leading edge of personalization and marketing content. We spend some time on the importance of business experiments, and the challenges of data.
Rui's grounding in philosophy turns out to be incredibly useful in the knowledge challenges of a fast-moving AI company.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
Good morning, everybody. It's Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of Email <arketing. And my guest this morning and I'm delighted to get a chance to talk with him after looking at his background is really a Walt's Senior Director of Product Management at Reflektion. That's our f l e. k. t IO and right. Correct. Yeah. Welcome in. Thanks for making the time.
Rui Ewald
Absolutely. It seems like you're you're giving us a platform to showcase what we're doing. And that's
Matthew Dunn
that's exactly that's exactly it. Why don't you Just to orient people, especially, especially those who are listening, not watching watching me handwave orient us a bit about Reflektion and the the set of things that you guys cover quite a platform.
Rui Ewald
Yeah, thank you. So Reflektion is a platform to get the right product in front of the right person at the right time. Okay, the problem we're trying to solve is, you know, if somebody is coming to your site to see 2050 products, on average, which 20 or 50 products out of your hundreds of 1000s of products should they see, right? It's working more in the middle of the funnel, after you've brought people to the site, then what, right? Don't Don't ignore that piece. It's the piece that actually brings you that cash at the end of the day. And, yeah, we have an extension of the platform, which we consider to be a system of intelligence on top of your system of record, to really bring more of the people that drop off the funnel via email, or other messaging types
Matthew Dunn
and, and substantial amount of sense substantial amount of change in what a website can deliver in that experience as well. Right?
Rui Ewald
Correct. Yeah. So it goes across content and product, as well as we have several modules which you can pick from. But ultimately, our intent is to connect those modules across search recommendations, email, to provide any visitor coming into the site with a consistent experience, and a digital dialogue between you and the machine that allows you to scale to stay pertinent in the topic that they are guiding you through their actions that they're interested in. Right.
Matthew Dunn
I mean, you mentioned middle of the funnel, and I was gonna, I was gonna chime in and say, it seems to me as I was reading up a bit on the platform in the company, that you really start marrying up what's known about a customer, and what a company's got to present to them, you know, in more and more intelligent ways that relationship goes along. fair assessment.
Rui Ewald
fair assessment. Yeah. So we're, we're building profiles for each person coming into the site. We also have profiles for every product and content that you have also given to us, and we're able to marry the affinities that this person has, maybe from where they came from, what search keywords, they came from Google. Right, what link they clicked on what category page, etc. Yeah. And we, as they continue to browse through the site, we're able to associate or interpret those affinities from what they browsed with the things that you have to continue to narrow down the site experience towards their intent, right, increase efficiency in conversions, and you know, this should all result into better KPIs all around average order values, rate of return, our PVS, and so forth.
Matthew Dunn
Got it. Got it. Wow. And, and a substantial amount of AI. Under the hood, this is not just straight database matching, right?
Rui Ewald
Yeah, we have probably, you know, one of the best, most well thought out AI driven experience platforms in the market today, allowing us to really scale and, you know, not to rely on rules to to help the experience along. Right. You know, some of the customers that I talked to that have that have come on board, they feel like they were the they were the experience platform, right, they have to set a segment then set a target for what they want that segment to see and so forth. And that becomes an extremely difficult manual process that requires quite a few folks to, to manage. Yeah, you know, put on and off, you know, depending on the promotional events, and so forth. Oh, now we got to take down these things and put out put some other up. And, you know, that always is extremely difficult and time consuming.
Matthew Dunn
So, you know, it's funny when I read when I read headlines, when I read the headlines that talk about AI eliminating jobs. Think, man, the world is I'm sorry, but the world is a lot messier than we think. And and it's not like you just have a magic sorting machine that makes sense of the universe. Like there's a considerable amount of work involved. People work interpretation, if you will, you know, cleaning up reconciling the mess, and there's always surprises, right? Yeah. See doing that category. Why is he interested in now? What do you mean, we have a whole lot of people who are looking for such and such right, we didn't think about that advance.
Rui Ewald
Yeah. It starts with applying artificial intelligence in the data processing part of things right. So it starts for us with understanding your products better, so when you give us a product feed, for example, your catalog feed, we're going to apply AI to understand colors. We actually use machine vision, yes, ever to tell products and their color similarity associate simplified color names, right? The the National Federation names so so that we can power better searches. And we can power searches that have color modified type of use cases. So like, like green, for example, we can actually power that very clearly and associate your profile with that kind of affinity. So yeah, AI is great at problems that have lots of people on one side, viewing lots of products that have lots of attributes, lots,
Matthew Dunn
lots of data, lots of data and marrying them up in a richer way.
Rui Ewald
Right, making those, you know, associations that only a machine could could be able to do at scale for every visitor, right? Yeah, yeah, gotcha. So know that you like plaid, but you only like plaid when it's dark green. Right. That kind of thing is the type of nuance that we're talking about. You know, we've,
Matthew Dunn
we've had a toe in the water campaign changes we've had, we've had a toe in the water looking at, at at machine learning on image tagging, because because I think it starts to open up some new possibilities there. And I'm intrigued that you you keyed in on color. Are there other? Are there other attributes of machine learning conclusions about product images? Is that you find are particularly effective drivers have a better experience?
Rui Ewald
Yeah, machine vision alone, I think it would be not enough of a dimension. But if you marry machine vision to help sort out questions that the the base algorithm might have on on tagging of these products, that I think it's extremely valuable. And that's what we have found. So we we are marrying machine vision with the ability to to sift through the actual values, the textual values of your product tags, to be able to better qualify better structured information that goes into the engine in the back end. And that that creates a cleansed set of tags that understand what are the primary categories of a product, what is the primary gender attribute of that particular product? So and this goes across industries, we have our taggers able to go across industries, not specific to just apparel. We have customers like Petco, for example that that we help to sort out the pet food. Right, right, right. Associate what type of buyer you are with what type of stuff you're buying for your Pat. So
Matthew Dunn
I want to I want to seize on that for a sec is one, I'm glad you. I'm glad you touched on customers, because I did want to ask about about some of the, you know some of the categories customers fit in. But stick with a stick with pet food for a second. Like this dog food may look a lot like this cat food. But if I own a dog and not a cat, Don't show me cat food. Right? So you've got to grapple with the substance of the product, not just not just the cosmetics of the photo of the product, right? Fair enough.
Rui Ewald
Fair enough. Yes. However, you must be ready to pivot to that cat as well. Right? So I want to a dog might own a dog because I bought dog food. But now I might be shopping for my cat. So now I should be able to eventually see the pet cat food as well. So how do you do that? You do that with the same types of attributes. See It Now if you bought a particular brand of dog food you might also like that brand for your cat does right?
Matthew Dunn
Right? Okay. Okay, please see
Rui Ewald
more emphasis in the latest intent is where it becomes really interesting and effective for conversion rates. Just want to cover that slight nuance. People think oh yeah, you now have added me to the to the dog owner dog owner and and I'm only going to see dog. But in fact, what our engine does is it associates up and down your profile with your latest intent and we can say yes, you are probably a dog owner but you are also a cat owner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're interested in shopping for that and we totally can pivot the experience around that as well.
Matthew Dunn
Well, I would I take this at a slightly off topic and Goofy but I think relevant direction if we could go along with it on I've been reading about the dunce does a blog post actually about the the upcoming elimination of third party cookies, which is going to affect the world of digital advertising profoundly. And and Google has has made some noise at least about their proposed replacement. I believe the acronym is flock f. L OC, federated learning cohort, something like that. But it struck me in one article I read that they said, you'll be assigned to one flock at a time. And I instinctively went, uh, hang on a minute. Because what you just said about waiting the latest behavior. Yep. And about that constant readiness to change and expanded and put me in a category of one, if you will. It says, Wait a minute now shopping canaries. Okay fine canaries It is for this particular guy. Any any reactions to the to the notion of single cohort at a time?
Rui Ewald
Yeah, it's an interesting approach that Google has, Google has a lot of properties, right. And they have a lot of information about you in ways that you may not even understand. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. They, I think what they intend to do there is not to necessarily, you know, put you in, in one segment, but to start with one segment, and then move on quickly as well. You know, I, I don't know. I'm just speculating, but yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Well, the scale the scale that you know, scale, they're gonna play the scale. You guys play it, I'm sure. It's like, just mind boggling amount of data to try and get to some actionable conclusions in, you know, in milliseconds on
Rui Ewald
our scale is huge. But there's this global.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah, global glow indeed. But it's it. It's interesting, the world's moving in this direction, if you will, had to take that thread and run a different way with it on. Talk to me about some of the discussions and maybe even decisions you've had internally, about balancing privacy with an improved experience? Oh, that's,
Rui Ewald
that's a great question. Thank you for asking that question. So our whole philosophy is about speed and connectivity, and putting a lot of emphasis into now. Okay, so that means that we try not to take risk in using your personally identifiable information. Okay. to personalize your experience. Okay, our in our entire intent is to learn from what you're doing on the site, learn from what we have covered from you before. And by by nature of it being fast, and within the same session, the next set of things that you see already intake, the things that you have just done. Okay. Okay, that allows us to be very ready to personalize and go after what you're currently into. Without disregarding what you've done in the past. But yeah, so you don't need to know your DNA.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. And, and so what you just what you just said implies that it's very much a real time, real time engine in terms of the in terms of the content that feeds into the experience of the set of products or whatever that I'm going to see on the next page.
Rui Ewald
Yes, that's exactly right. We do we do have in keep a history. And we can keep a longer history, depending on a particular retailers rate of return. Yeah. Visitors? Yes, for some, the duration of this, this information is a year or so. Maybe more. But for others, it's more important that I am able to pivot around because you only hear once. So take more risk, right. So, but in any case, the the engine is real time, it's assessing your current intent versus before. I think history is very important to start at the right point with any customer, right? Especially when you start thinking about omni channel, when you start thinking about what is my app experience going to look like? My voice gonna look like? Wow. Yeah, if you're, if you're able to give us a an identifier for this visitor, and we will stitch that identity across and give you restart your experience from where you left off. Okay. I think that's, that's very useful, you know, and email is the associating party across all of these things. Of course, no matter where you came from, you can end up with an email in your inbox that later will stitch everything together as well. Okay,
Matthew Dunn
I was gonna I was gonna I was gonna get to email. But let's, let's set the context a bit on big channels that Reflektion grapples with that you've had to grapple with as you evolve the product. Lab. We talked about app you just mentioned. Yep. On Did you say voice as well?
Rui Ewald
You can certainly build a voice assistant based on the data that you're capturing. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Although the visual inputs not as useful, except that it informs what you talk about, so to speak. By the way did you hear Did you did you catch the news this morning, Microsoft just bought new on For about $16 billion.
Rui Ewald
Yeah, that's an incredible acquisition. Yeah. Who
Matthew Dunn
said who said who said voice is dead? Right. Not? Not even close. So we ticked off web app, potentially voice email you mentioned on any other sort of big pieces there.
Rui Ewald
Yeah. I mean, it's headless. Right. So I, I think the experiences that you can build on a headless e commerce platform are infinite. Right? So we you can build a Facebook store, right, an Instagram store? Okay. You know, all of those things are, are things that you can do with the type of data that I'm that I'm
Matthew Dunn
off. Do you have any? Do you have anyone powering a change in, in house live experience with your engine yet?
Rui Ewald
What do you mean?
Matthew Dunn
Well, if I, you know, if I go in, I have been inside a retailer in at least a year, but if hypothetically, I was inside a store, right? It's drapes, not a typical to see monitors. And really, there's a media feed, there's a media experience. That's part of the store.
Rui Ewald
Yes, we are powering several clienteling apps.
Matthew Dunn
Okay. Okay, that's kind of cool.
Rui Ewald
With a with an identifier of any type, we can provide a stitched experience from this person's online and store. You know, profile.
Matthew Dunn
Let's go real crazy. Any VR yet?
Rui Ewald
No, VR yet
Matthew Dunn
now? Yeah. Okay. I, I, I wonder, I really wonder if that's if, if anyone's gonna get their investment back? Oh, yeah. You're so yeah,
Rui Ewald
I think VR is a little bit more esoteric, will still I think there's potential there because especially, you know, turbocharged by COVID. But I think it's about, you know, helping those companies that aren't investing in VR. Yeah. Have the right data at the right time about the person that is viewing so that, you know, again, we can help you power your VR
Matthew Dunn
headless, right, you don't care. Yeah. It's, that's a that's a whole whole nother level of, of challenge. Although Never Never, Never Say Never either.
Rui Ewald
Yeah, microservices in the cloud, they can, the sky's the limit. There's a lot of customers that are pushing the envelope there. Yeah, I'm, I'm very impressed with some of some of the maturity that has happened in in the industry in the e commerce industry with, you know, players really building out a development team and building out a product management facility within their their e commerce team. It's no longer just a set of merchandisers and marketers trying to sell products, they now are thinking about how to build these experiences, and how to optimize experiences and they rely heavily on us to to continuously drive that optimization.
Matthew Dunn
So you, you sound You sound just a little bit pleasantly surprised by that.
Rui Ewald
I'm extremely pleasantly surprised, because that's what we what we have been preaching for some time, right? Okay. marketers have had the the data driven movement, growth movement in their mind for for a while now. merchandisers had not for the past until the past couple of years. Okay. So the actual The, the part of the funnel that that our company addresses, really hasn't seen the same movement towards data driven until two years ago or three. It's an interesting, interesting,
Matthew Dunn
what any, any speculation on just aside from time, what what kind of prompted or supported that shift?
Rui Ewald
I think a lot of the a lot of the companies, I've seen that there are competitors out there that are building all of these experiences, okay, certainly the big gorilla, right, that the Amazons of the world are pushing the experiences to the next level. And, you know, in order for you to stay in the game and not become commoditized your experiences have to be differentiated and have to be personalized and have to be, you know, omni channel and and, yeah, I think you have to be prepared to make the investments. Yeah. And, you know, that includes people that understand how to be data driven and to be always thinking about how to make more with less.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, there's a funny tension. And and I do want to, I do want to delve into your background, a little bit and how you ended up bit of doing what you're doing now. But there's a, we're doing this reconciling two things that didn't go in the same box not that long ago. One is a very technical, data driven approach to the world but the other is a very rich experiencial approach to the world. And like that, where those two things intersect is where companies are seeing some some success or seeing their competitors run. way from them.
Rui Ewald
That's right. Yeah, you're you're right on. I think if you if you have the right data, then you're measuring whether the experiences have been good or bad. Right. So if if your data is coming out the other end with a higher retention rate, higher conversion rates higher rpv, likely you're providing a better site experience. And of course, it should empirically verify that right. Make sure that you're optimizing for the right things. Yeah. But I think those are certainly correlated.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Right. Yeah. And it's more possible. Now. You know, we've got, we've got infrastructure that wasn't there not that long ago, we've got resources, you mentioned micro services, and we've got scalable compute resources, scalable data resources, that would have just been impossible. I mean, five, six years ago, you would have said, No way, we can't like, we can't do that. And now it's just like, spin up more VMs? If you need it, yeah, you'll pay for them. But you didn't have to build them a year in advance.
Rui Ewald
Yeah. And that means that our retailers can can build out these, these product teams within them to really start to experiment with, you know, how to build these experiences in the cloud. I don't think it costs a lot for you to spin up some instances, server instances anywhere, Microsoft, Amazon, wherever it may be, right, yeah. Anyway, build out these experiences at scale. Yeah. And to only commit to as much as you want, right? You can funnel in 10% of your traffic there and see how it's going.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Right. Well, I'm tickled that you mentioned experiments, this, this came up in a conversation, I believe, last week with with another guest, and we were talking about how important it is. And it's in time how hard it is, for companies to to keep the mindset of you actually have to be willing to invest in experiments now. Because it feels like you're running. So you'd like so pal Bell, just just keeping the trains on time that that there's no room for that. But But you have to right?
Rui Ewald
Absolutely. And I think it's crucial for you to be measured in that in how you experiment. Right. And I think one of the things that our product whilst people with and this is not a plug, but I just want to make sure that people understand, we can allow you to experiment on algorithms. Nice, you know, what algorithm should I provide? Yeah, this recommendation versus another set of recommendations, given the context of the user, given the the placement on the site? Yeah, yeah. Well, Reflektion provides you with one, have the ability to build your own algorithm using non technical tools. And then to be able to experiment on your on your production traffic, and collect your data and verify whether it's better or worse.
Matthew Dunn
No, no, no coding experience, no code experience engineering.
Rui Ewald
That's right. And you know, your investment became just an investment on our subscription. Yeah, as opposed to buying instances and creating your own data team to build an algorithm and then test them against each other.
Matthew Dunn
So if you're the if you're the merchandiser, retail market, or whatever you try to, you're trying to help them focus on which experiences make the difference, not which codebase of which algorithm eventually leads to experience x y, right?
Rui Ewald
With democratized Yeah, how you think about optimizing your experience, right? So you no longer need to be, you know, Amazon sized in order to get to the bottom of what works better for you for your, your retailer for you. Okay,
Matthew Dunn
they've come up twice. So it's fair, it's fair game now that Amazon comes up about 50% of the time, sessions with guests and it's, it's hard to avoid these days, because they're there. They're so dominant, and they're so there's so cutting edge in so many practices, that you do have to go Whoa, okay, look at what's happening, or look what they're doing there. And it's not a like or dislike Amazon. It's a just sheer admiration at what they what they've done. Right, and what they continue to do. very innovative company.
Rui Ewald
Yeah, they're very innovative. And they're also they've achieved the scale that that becomes self fulfilling.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, right, in a way. Agree.
Rui Ewald
I think you must be prepared not to have a static site, you must be prepared to experiment and to target people better with dynamic experiences. So yeah, there's nobody that you look at most to see, you know, how you might want to transform yourself. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And, and, and if in a lot of cases, particularly for retail of various sorts. You do have to pay attention. Because you might get your lunch eaten by that big company out of Seattle as well.
Rui Ewald
Yep, exactly, you know, must differentiate yourself. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, yeah, you really must. Um, you mentioned dynamic experience. And we're talking about Amazon. And I did want to take at least a side trip into email and email content, because that that is one of the, that is one of the pieces of the product line out of Reflektion. Talk to us about what you guys do, and how you make email different.
Rui Ewald
Good. Good question. So I cannot talk about our email without talking about the platform as a whole. Sure. The reason being is that everything starts with the visitor profiles, and the product profiles that we're collecting on the regular basis. So if you think about this, our email is an extension of that all of the the good stuff that we've done to in real time be able to assess who this person is and what they're after. We've built an email extension that allows you to simply add Reflektion HTML tags, to your email templates, doesn't matter what email it is drip campaigns, promotion, email, doesn't matter. We don't care. Right? That email tag will transform itself into whatever that client needs to see, essentially.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, so you're so you're taking, you're taking the content, and I assume you're talking about on image content link content, you're taking that tag with, you know, tag with an ID and possibly some customer specific payload, and saying, Okay, this is the right thing at the moment of open. That's right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So
Rui Ewald
if you come back to the site, after I sent that email, it still be relevant. Right? Right. So it's, it's an extremely powerful tool for for driving people back to the site. Yeah, you can leverage all of the algorithms that we have, from the on site experience into your emails. So if you wanted to try a different set of algorithms, see which one does better, all of those things, you can you can do that with us. And your scale is however many emails you can send.
Matthew Dunn
You also you also just, you almost glossed over it. But uh, but but I think it's worth noting you, you implied that you're, you implied a considerable amount of help with the production workload of product information and what you just said,
Rui Ewald
Yes.
Matthew Dunn
Like, it's big, or you talk to an email production shop doing things, I'd say the old fashioned way. But let's say it's the mainstream way to be more fair, like, Oh, we've got to go get a get the image of blah, blah, blah, cuz that's going in the campaign. And we got to get that and put it in the email platform. So it's hosted in one yet again, like, and if someone changes their mind, if the product manager comes screaming in it says it's not big screen TVs. Today, it's going to be something else, then you're revising that work manually. And what you just said is your tag will take care of it.
Rui Ewald
That's right. And you can build rules on our controls. Yes. So even after the email was sent, yeah, if you want it to now promote that television sets. Use Case You can Yeah, right. So not only did we automate the image, the copy, the the ability to personalize but also the ability, the ability to to pivot around a particular merchandising strategy that maybe wasn't the right one when you first push send on those emails.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, now now you're saying in my song that real time real time email content Well, it's that's that's where campaign genius sorta lives, lives and breathes is real time email content on we don't we don't have anywhere near the the AI and product plus customer engine, we've just been focusing on trying to make, you know, content more interesting and more live period, in all sorts of ways. But I would have to say, to my surprise, 90 95% of email marketers, say what when you say real time content, like it's not thought of as a mainstream possibility. And you and I are going well, yeah, of course.
Rui Ewald
Exactly. I don't know what else to say. It's, you know, you open the email, we check who you are, and what you've what you're interested in. And then based on the algorithms you want to generate, if it's similar to the things you've seen before, if it's the same thing you want to you want to retarget them with, that's fine, too. Yeah. But all of these algorithms that we have available, view them but but together, viewed together, complimentary, yeah, complete the look that all of those algorithms can be used based on what you've done in the past and who you are.
Matthew Dunn
Nice. Nice. So let's rabbit hole a little further on email and This may be of interest to you, you mean maybe six other people. But here we go. One of the things that we've run into is we've worked with customers and introduced real time content into their email mix is, is they've got to start thinking, realizing they have to start thinking differently about how the body copy and the real time content sync up. You can have body copy talking about nothing but dogs. Yep. If there's a risk, that Reflektion is going to drop a cat picture and right on top of it. Right.
Rui Ewald
Yeah, I mean, that content needs to be dynamic, too. You have to assess what content needs to be dynamic in your templates. Right. Right. And which one does not? I think it's important that we focus primarily, we focus first on the product, because we feel like that gives you the most bang for the buck. And then you you think about other other parts of the email that need to be dynamic as well.
Matthew Dunn
Right? Okay. Okay, let's
Rui Ewald
see if that starts to come together. For most people, you can, you can restrain the products that I send you. The other rules, as I mentioned, figured, yeah, so you don't have, you don't have the problem of you know, putting together products for cat and then saying the copy of something else. Because you can, you can make sure that your your the category that this person is targeted with is restrained to a certain set. So it's AI with controls, right. Yeah. And that, that ensures that the male is, you know, has has a right theme and the right, the right tone is struck with the customer,
Matthew Dunn
I don't think really is quite old enough to be to have watched friends in its first season. But Oh, come on. This is now becoming the one about cats and dogs. Which is awesome, right? We can make it that simple. We help people understand all of the technical complexities a bit. Um, you. I wanted to I wanted to ask you about your background, because I read your LinkedIn profile. And you've you've hit you've been at a number of interesting companies, CBS interactive, Disney among them. But I wanted to go farther back in your history and ask you about how you got from small liberal arts college in Seattle, Seattle University, to what you're doing now. And what you think about how well that prepared you for what you're doing. Now?
Rui Ewald
That's a interesting question. I got a double major in International Business and Economics. And I'm doing product management. Yeah. I think economics really prepared me in general. And I think the school was very related to to critical thinking. Yeah. You know, they emphasize that in everything that we did from having to take theology classes, all the way to Yeah, also the philosophy classes. Yep. All the way to the economics classes themselves, the hard ones. So I think, if there's anything that I've learned, as a product manager is to ask questions, and to never take anything as as a dogma, and and to make sure that you experiment above it all. So I think my education was fit me perfectly to have the humility to always understand that, you know, you must experiment you have one hypothesis. Yeah. You don't have the answer. Yeah. You try it. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And I can really see the matchup between the econ background and very, very data quantified data driven, constant change of a product set, like Reflektions. That's
Rui Ewald
fascinating. Yeah, exactly. It just just kind of fell in to work that way. Yeah, exactly.
Matthew Dunn
What would it would I be fair, I'm guessing that you also got darn good at learning new stuff. And that that's paid off? Rather? Well?
Rui Ewald
Yeah, I certainly have taught myself a good share of it. The chair of computer science, yeah, yeah. But it's, you know, just for for proof of concept building and for, you know, data analysis and that kind of thing.
Matthew Dunn
Well, and understanding as a product manager, you got it. You got to keep sort of continual learning curve about what your customers are actually doing, not what you think they need to do, but what they're actually doing what's working, what's not. There's a huge learning curve there as well. When you get when you onboard a new customer. It's like, oh, wait a minute. We didn't know you're gonna do that. Right.
Rui Ewald
Well, yeah, but you build the system with with the idea that it can be, you know, a number of components that are assembled together to create a solution that is custom for you. Yeah. Where at least a number of number of Lego pieces Right. And those Lego pieces can be different. Yeah. And swap together and assembled together will give you a different combination essentially, is what we have built a Reflektion. Nice. So, but one thing that we did do, which is, which is incredible. It's more on the back end. But it's this standardization of product attributes, if you really, yeah. So one of the things that we've done that is interesting is that most platforms don't have is, you know, an attribute like price, for example, yeah, may be coming across all products. However, some platforms may may treat it as a custom attribute is not connected everywhere else. Yeah. So what that means is you can't build algorithms that come to rely on that attribute. Yeah. And therefore you have algorithms per per client. And you can't really assess which ones are doing better in in this context of a site. We, on the other hand, have a standardized we have built algorithms that are based on these attributes being there, right being present. Yeah. And then we can look at all of our customers and see what are the algorithms that are doing best? How can we make this algorithm better, like Google would with their search results? Do that with the algorithms that we apply for search and recommendations throughout our clients? base
Matthew Dunn
data has to be one heck of a taxonomy?
Rui Ewald
Yes, indeed.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. by the fact your philosophy background, right. It's an ontology problem. Exactly.
Rui Ewald
It is absolutely an ontology problem.
Matthew Dunn
Interesting, I love it. I love it.
Rui Ewald
Way beyond email marketing.
Matthew Dunn
Well, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's the fun in front of this. It certainly bears on email marketing and making it more effective. But it's not like that's something that can be done in isolation, it absolutely has to connect and stay, stay contextual, to the relationship between the company and the customer of the company and the prospect.
Rui Ewald
And that allows us to scale it. So if you think about what solutions like, used to be like, there still are there. Yeah, they're custom, per per retailer. Right? What we have done is we've built Lego pieces that are standardized, but putting those Lego pieces together gives you a custom solution. So that that has really accelerated our business and made it so that the gains from from from learnings in one place can be leveraged elsewhere.
Matthew Dunn
Right? That's it's not, it's not a simple thing to pull off organizationally, either. We're on Reflektion as a company, roughly how many people distributed were like what's what's it look like there with your team?
Rui Ewald
Yeah, we're, we're primarily in the United States. We're heavily concentrated here in the e commerce sector. But we are spread out geographically. Amongst the Americas primarily. We have offices in South America, a good chunk of our of our scientist and development team is down there. Nice. But also in Chicago, New York and San Francisco.
Matthew Dunn
Okay. And you've got you've gotten clients all over the world, if I recall, right.
Rui Ewald
We do have clients that are worldwide, however, they're mostly based in the US.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Well, coming in over the company, company Epicenter there. And, you know, for the most avid consumers in the world, that's probably a logical thing, but has, has the pandemic of the past year have been a boost to business?
Rui Ewald
It's been fantastic. And because people, people feel like they must get the the online experience, right. You know, for most brick and mortar retailers, they, they rely heavily on on the store experience. Yes. And the store brings most of their revenues to bear. With with the pandemic, that wasn't the case. So they needed to make sure that that channel is as fine tuned as they can be. So
Matthew Dunn
seems like they're still I, you know, we're having this conversation in April, as soon as the US starts to starts to look like we're, you know, getting out of getting out of jail. Britain just announced, I think that, that they're starting to loosen the clamps a little bit this morning. Yeah. And and, you know, it's been hard. It's been a particularly hard time for a lot of businesses. I've seen a lot of adaptation, the things that you touched on about brick and mortar stores, realizing that the the online component of what they do can't be ignored anymore. And at the same time, it seems like there's also still, there's still a long, long runway ahead and a lot more work to do to reconstruct them next. Yeah.
Rui Ewald
And let me tell you some of the things that we're thinking about brick and mortar We are making your site an extension of your stores of each one of your stores. Okay, so just to take a quick pause there, that means buy online pick up in store, that means data aggregation across, you know, data attribution to the store that was bought online, right? Because at this point, I can actually have a view of your store that is just with the products that are sold in that store with a ranking that is based on the things that are selling in that store. Okay. So this gives you a really an extent your site is no longer a competitor to a store, right? Your sales clerk actually will feel like they can guiding somebody to the site. Yeah, and not lose the sale. Right, so to speak. So yeah, that it changes the paradigm a little bit on how you see value out of the store, and how consumers can you know, what is what is better than next day shipping is to drive 15 minutes to the store and get it?
Matthew Dunn
I changed the paradigm a lot. There's a there's an outdoor retailer that I'm a longtime fan of who grew substantially online, and they've got a handful of just a handful of stores. And they happen to open open one in a relatively small town that I live in, in Bellingham, Washington. And I was like, Yay. And then I went to the store. I'm like, oh, man, you don't have this, you know that. I was hoping you have this. So so for sure their site was a competitor to their store. Yep. In my case, and you're saying that they'll start to be able to make that much more of a complimentary
Rui Ewald
access, right. Yeah. But the whole intent would be that you're able to have the store become part of that paradigm. Yeah. Not not a competitor to that paradigm. Yeah, yeah. And with that comes a lot of a lot of advantages, starting from buy online pick up in store, which a few of our retailers have already rolled out like Rite Aid or Petco. But also, you can start to build store pages online, right, which have recommendations from what is trending in that store. So you know, also identity stitching offline and online, all of that becomes a reality. And with that, comes your email marketing, your email marketing can become more personal. And so if you have stylists in store, if you have sales clerks that build the relationship with the client, you can start sending emails to them that are not from so and so store. It's, you know, from this sales clerk at this store. Wow.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Wow, that's exciting. Yeah, I finished a long haul. project on my, on my, on my four by four. Sorry, come on. And I made multiple trips to the hardware, you know, hardware store, which is a different pain and pain in the backside, in a pandemic than other times. And if that store had been able to say, you know, hey, Ding Dong, you got the bolts? Did you? Did you remember to pick up washers? over an aisle six? Oh, thank you very much. That's the kind of thing you're talking about. Right?
Rui Ewald
Well, it actually goes beyond what I was talking about that goes into fitment? I don't know if you know what that is. I don't know the term. Ah, well, fitment is the idea that you might have a product, a third party product for which you're buying parts to. Okay. Right. So there's several retailers that, that exist in that, in that part, space auto parts is one of the biggest ones, but you know, anywhere that sells parts to a complex product that you might have, like a fridge, yeah, all the way to a computer to a bike to etc, right? These retailers have been largely left to their own devices to create the associations between the products and their parts. So Reflektion actually has a specific set of feature set for fitment parts.
Matthew Dunn
Wow,
Rui Ewald
that would do exactly what you just said. So like I can build not only a store based experience, but also a fitment based experience where you would say what four by four you have in your garage, and then the whole site is about your four by four.
Matthew Dunn
Right and and potentially facilitate partnerships, right like you can get the you can get the radiator hose here, but you're going to need to go to did that spot for lug nuts.
Rui Ewald
But definitely, I mean, that's something that data pooling i think is where you're trying to get into that's something that we are we have done together but the market has not been there Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, the markets not there yet. But if it you know, eventually that actually may be This is so fun, a wild tangent, but that that may be one of the competitive opportunities of in a world dominated by Amazon for so many categories. One of the opportunities they beat out partner.
Rui Ewald
That's absolutely correct. And that's why we keep an eye on that our system is built to be able to do data pulling in the back end. Wow. You know, that's something that we would have to start to think about how do we foster the data pulling of like competitors, but yeah, so it becomes a lot stickier but I think Yeah, given the right pressures in the market, I think it becomes more and more of a need for for folks to be able to share and potentially in vertical markets more so. Yeah, I
Matthew Dunn
think Yeah, yeah. That Yeah, that Yeah, that makes sense. I was I was reading an article this morning about the rise in the cost of plywood. Building Materials are up 180%. In the last year, right,
Rui Ewald
I saw that too.
Matthew Dunn
Oh, yeah. Yeah. But talk about talk about a vertical where you need the plastic, you know, where you need the parts to connect. If you're doing a remodel, you're not going to get everything in one store?
Exactly. You're just not.
Rui Ewald
And it would be good for them to partner together so that they know, you know, who does what this person is doing. Right? They have a project XYZ, and they just bought maybe, you know, four by four. Now they might be doing, you know, a number of different things. Yeah, start to narrow down by what they bought next, which is, let's say shingles? No, no, they're doing the roof. Right. And Right,
Matthew Dunn
right. Right. So one of these days we're gonna see my partner's content show up in in my email, real time. Kind of where we just go ever
Rui Ewald
say never,
Matthew Dunn
ever say never say never. I think I think that would actually be I can actually be pretty fun. But we've got to gotta walk before we walk before we run there. Really, I'm keeping an eye on the clock. And I got to tell you up for more than a half an hour we talked about but are you game to do a speed round as we wrap up?
Rui Ewald
Yeah, let's,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Okay. So since we were there already, dogs, cats, both or neither?
Rui Ewald
ducks talks. Okay.
Matthew Dunn
Name a favorite place.
Rui Ewald
I have to go with my hometown sentence. Si en tu es.
Matthew Dunn
Where's that? In Brazil? In Brazil? Okay, that explains the Portuguese. On your, on your LinkedIn, Portuguese in terms of languages that you handle? Favorite book or author?
Rui Ewald
Well, I'm very much into, you know, real story books. I'm currently reading a book by two economists, by which name I forget. It's about you know, the the reality behind the the policies that have happened up to now. Sorry, I'm a little bit of a nerd. That's remember their their names, as well. Yeah. But, you know, it's about helping people understand. What are the policies that this country of have taken and the reason why we are in the situation that we are with the divide and people voting against themselves? Yeah, yeah, I know. I remember their names.
Matthew Dunn
Sorry. Okay. We're Yeah, we are in the middle of one heck of a large economic experiment. Among other things, aren't we? as we are, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's good. If you if you think of, if you think of the author, I shoot me an email with the title because I've actually gotten, I've gotten a really great shortlist of books from guests. When I asked this question, people go like, God, this or this, and they're, and wonderfully all over the place, which is, which has been fun. What's, uh, what's the biggest? What's the biggest contrast for you? between Brazil and the US just as like, as a working professional?
Rui Ewald
Oh, my goodness. You know, there's been a lot of them. I've been away from from Brazil for 21 years. Okay, so most of my adult life has been here, so I didn't actually get a real job there. Okay. But I would say, you know, society is much more about family first, living life first and then working. One particularly striking part of American society as people ask you, what do you do first, within the first five questions? Yeah. And that's not something that that I was, you know, was remotely used to back home. So yeah, yeah, it was more about who is your hair or your parents or your parents, right? Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah, that that is in some countries. I've heard that that's actually the American tendency to to go into what do you do is rude?
Rui Ewald
Well, you know, it could be not know where I come from. We don't care. But it's more about, you know, if you truly are right, because you you might be somebody who knows a lot about email marketing, and that's great. And we connected that level and we can talk for a long time. time. Yeah. But it's about having I think, more of the the real depth, more difficult conversations that you don't typically have with here in the US as much politics. You know, all of those things that are now even more difficult you know? Yeah, yeah, we we tend to jump into those first. That one that might be rude here
Matthew Dunn
router router or put you put you at risk if you're not careful or something like that. Yeah, it's just it's it's interesting and for you to have spent, you know, your, your adult life here after after being raised in another country, you're put you in a good scrape perspective right struggling to get back often.
Rui Ewald
I haven't been back since 2008. And my answer when you ask me where where might be related to my homesickness?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, I mean, not any not that you're going to remedy that now. It's still kind of dodgy time to travel. But Oh, yes.
Rui Ewald
And especially to that,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, especially a very, very, very hard hit. Well, let's hope Let's hope as a globe, we can help each other out of this thing on and move on a little better footing together.
Rui Ewald
Most certainly.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Well, really, it's been a it's been a pleasure talking to talking with you today really has.
Rui Ewald
Likewise, it's been it's been incredible. So love the experience. Thank you very much for giving us a platform and you know, I hope, I hope you do well and let us know how we can help you. We'll see. We'll
Matthew Dunn
see what happens down the road. My guest once again has been really a well, Senior Director of Product Product Management at Reflektion. That's Reflektion with a Kay Reflektion Comm. Correct. Correct. If you want to learn more about Roy's company, that's the place to go. Thanks.