I love this story, the down to earthness of some of these legendary founders. And for me, it drives home that you're there. You're not working for a nameless, faceless private equity firm. You're working for someone who's put their own name on the business. And I think that even ups the stakes of a replatform decision. And I think replatforming is one of the. Whether to replatform or not is one of the big topics that the industry as a whole deals with. And certainly for those of us like Shopware, who are actively pursuing and trying to serve the mid market, that question itself becomes the elephant in the room and how you take a risk to move away from what is effectively a tap, whether it's an ugly tap, a leaky tap, whatever the case may be, that's flowing, actively flowing revenue.
Ben Marks:
That's something that I'd love to chat with you about a bit now. And I don't want to fail to mention the rest of your time as you've gone more into the consultancy world of late. And then again, your work at details Interactive, which I guess has been around, what, since 2018. Is that right?
Mark Friedman:
Yeah. It actually started after I left Warnico. It albania telegram screening was the first time that I left that business in a restructure. It was the first time that I didn't have a job and wasn't quite sure what to do. So like many, I started an LLC and details interactive was born.
Ben Marks:
So it's been around and so that is for me really know you spent time know in the intervening kind of a, kind of a shame what happened to that. But back to Brooks Brothers doing consulting and then Eddie Bauer. So got a long established presence in the apparel world. But also looking at this from the evolution of digital commerce, the evolution and the establishment of platforms as the big playmakers in the world because I think it's absolutely the exception these days that someone would roll their own ecommerce solution at this point, right? The choices are abundant, many are mature, but yet we still find ourselves in a day and age where I think a lot of the conversations I'm having and I'm assuming in your role as a consultant, as an advisor, you probably hear that people are completely dissatisfied. And we have these discussions regularly that people are dissatisfied with the platform that they are on and sometimes that platform, they've been on it for a decade, five to ten years, and you talk to people in various roles, from the executive suite down to the actual people, the operators, who are interacting with their commerce platform day in, day out, and they are frustrated with it and they can't wait for it to change. But you talk to them a year later and they're still on the same platform. What are your thoughts around that and how often are you encountering that in your business?