(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine, 2018. Brought to you by Magento. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Magento Imagine 2018 from the Wynn, Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm excited to be joined by some award finalists of the Magento Imagine Experience Awards. We have Dr. Markus Reheis, the chief marketing officer at Gabor Shoes, and Stefan Willkommer, the CEO of TechDivision, a systems integrator. Hi guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> Hi, nice to meet you. >> Great to have you guys here. Congratulations on being an award finalist for the best sales channel growth. We're going to talk about that in a second, but Gabor Shoes. Talk to us about what Gabor does, where you guys are located, and then we'll talk about how you're transforming the shoe space with e-Commerce. >> Gabor is a manufacturer of shoes, ladies shoes only. Our headquarters in Germany, and our main markets are in Germany and central Europe, but we do also export to 60 countries, more than 60 countries worldwide, to China, to Korea, also to the United States a little. >> Lucky me. So your customers are the retailers themselves. How many different brands do you have, different SKUs, different products? I imagine it's massive numbers. >> Yes, our main product is ladies shoes, as I said, we have several brands for the ladies shoes, Gabor, Rollingsoft for the sports shoes type, but we also offer bags, handbags, and socks and tights, but the most important is the ladies shoes for us. >> So many, many hundreds of thousands of SKUs, lots of different locations. You've been the chief marketing officer there for quite a long time. Talk to us about the opportunity that you saw, that you could give to your retailers by expanding this physical in-store shopping experience into the online world. >> Yes, we have started our online business quite late. We long time hesitated to set up our own online shop toward the end user, because it was always our philosophy that we want to be partners of our retailers. We did not want to compete with them by opening an online shop. So it was clear for us that when we start our online business, we want to have our retailers as partners on our side. And that's why we developed this Omnichannel concept that integrates the retailers. >> Omnichannel is a word that we hear a lot at events like this. It's critical for a seamless customer experience. We were talking before we went live is we're all consumers, everyday lives, we pick up a tablet or a mobile phone and we expect to be able to find whatever we want at a simple click. What was the process like of becoming partners with your retailers? Was it an obvious sell to them, that they have revenue-generating opportunities, the opportunities to reach many more customers in different regions? Or was it more of a challenging conversation to convince them? >> Yeah, let me explain a little bit about the situation. We do distribute via traditional classic brick and mortar retailers primarily. There are around 5,000 companies worldwide that buy shoes from Gabor. They have around 20,000 stores. But the situation is that there is quite a mixed structure of retailers. Many of them are small businesses, family owned businesses, and they do not have the chance to have an own online presence that is competitive. So they have to focus on their brick and mortar business. But nowadays, in Germany, we have around 30% of all shoes that are bought online, and this brings many of our customers into trouble. So it was our idea to open this marketplace to let the traditional retailer participate at the online business. >> So talk to us about, from a technology perspective, the modern technology that you needed to be able to deliver this. So, Stefan, talk to us about how TechDivision, as a long-time partner of Magento, is helping in working with Gabor shoes to enable this Omnichannel experience. >> First of all, the marketplace looks like a simple online shop. So for the end consumer, it looks like any other online shop where you simply buy just the shoes. In the background, there are a lot of processes going on, so like we have to allocate orders to stores, to inventory locations, that means the retailer, and we have to look where the inventory is. We don't want to do a lot of order splitting, of course, because we don't want to ship a lot of different packages, and you need a sophisticated solution who is capable of doing exactly that, because I mean there are a lot of processes, and of course algorithms that around, what do you need, or what do you have to have in place that you can do that like that. And Magento was offering, with the order management, exactly great product to delivering that. So this is the foundation for the whole concept, and makes it able for us, and for Gabor, to integrate the retailers really smooth. >> So how many retailers are integrated currently? >> We have started the concept just a few months ago. It was surprising that so many retailers contacted us and said, I want to be part of that system. So we have around 100 retailers with around 400 stores that still have to be connected. Currently we have 40 stores connected with the system. >> So you had retailers that were proactively reaching out to you, saying, we want to get in on this? >> Yeah. >> Wow, that must have been pretty exciting. And Stefan, you mentioned the word simple. And that's something, as buyers, we want a simple, clean experience as the consumer, but also for the retailer, right, and the supplier. Talk to us about how you're leveraging, You mentioned the Magento management software, to give your retailers this complete visibility of their inventory so that they can fulfill through the right channels. >> Yeah, first of all it is in the German market, in the German retail shoe market, a little bit simpler, maybe than in other countries. There is a couple of POS solutions, there are not too many, and we build a basic interface so they can really easily attach their inventory to our order management, or the order management of Gabor, and then we are able to utilize the different inventory, or the different stocks. That is pretty simple. There are a lot of other processes which are not really technical, it's more about contracting, so more the retailers, there is of course some training, you have to train the people, the staff, because they have to use the platform, and that way they see, okay, an order is coming in, what they have to do now, they have to create the pick list, they have to pick the stuff, pack the stuff, ship the stuff, print the label out, putting the documents in and everything, so you have to train the people and the simplicity is because they just need a simple web browser to do that. So either a tablet or a PC, that's all what they need. They don't need any other software. They don't need really other devices. Basically most of the retail stores already have these kind of devices in store. >> So they can utilize an existing POS system, or maybe an ERP system ... >> Yes. >> instead of having to replace things. So from an integration perspective, it sounds like it's a fairly... >> Yeah, they don't have to invest really money, they just have to, I mean, bring the inventory, and that can be through a flat file, or through a web service, so both possibilities are there. Right now they just need a web browser connected to the internet, that's all. >> Sounds so simple. >> Yeah, it is. >> So let's talk about, we hear the term digital transformation used everywhere, and it means different things to different organizations, depending on where they are in that digital transformation journey. When we look at commerce, commerce is becoming a center of gravity for digital transformation. Markus, talk to us about the transformation that Gabor has undergone. Where are you on this digital transformation journey? >> Still, we are really right on the beginning. We have installed, of course, digital tools to make the sales process easier, but we always thought about B2B processes. For example, we have installed a B2B online shop maybe 10 or 12 years ago, so that's an existing thing. The new thing for us is that we go towards the end user. I have a number for you. We produce around 9 million pairs of shoes every year, and still the amount what we directly sell to the end user is a very, very small amount. So we are at the beginning of this process, but we have ambitious goals, and we want to grow in the future. We started our marketplace concept in Germany, but we want to roll it out to other European countries, maybe to countries outside Europe, so there's a lot to do, a lot of opportunities for us in the coming years. >> So let's talk about the rest of 2018. Here we are in April. You're going to be adding many more retailers. What are some of the things from a technology perspective that TechDivision is going to be able to do with you, and maybe Magento, to start finding the other 8 million in opportunities that you just mentioned? >> In the end, it's not just a thing of the online store, but of course it's a thing of online marketing, so this has to be increased, definitely. Yeah, we still have a lot of things to do, onboarding the retailers, and this again is not just a technical thing, it's a lot of, Stefan already told you, it's more to do with training, and explaining the processes, that costs a lot of time. So it goes step by step, but we make good progress there. >> So last question, Stefan, for you- as the chief marketing officer, I'm a marketer myself, tell me about, from a digital marketing perspective, as consumers, and really, in the B2B space, Magento had a study on their website that said 93% of B2B buyers want to purchase online, right? So we're seeing that trend as consumerization into the business space. From a marketing perspective, there's a lot of shifting going on there, too. Big data has been a big enabler of marketing becoming a science. And being able to demonstrate to the business and influence business there. Tell me a little bit about, in the last minute or so, how are you leveraging big data and analytics, maybe even through Magento, to redefine marketing that you're doing at Gabor? >> Yeah, again, big data can help us to build customer groups, to send them individual offerings. That's a good thing about the digital business, when we have a satisfied customer, of course we can always, again, send them products, product offerings, but these offerings have to be individual, they have to be relevant for the end user. That's why artificial intelligence, for example, can help us. >> Maybe to add something, we already started using Magento BI, for example. So we are using that full commerce suite of Magento right now. We are using the areas to measuring how fast the shipment is done through a retail stores, and then adjusting the allocation to that measurement. So if a retailer is shipping faster, it's getting more likely that he's getting an order allocated next time, when an allocation run is taking place. So we are using this to get a better end user, consumer experience, by having the products earlier, or more frequent ship. >> Right. So many benefits for the businesses, the retailers, maybe repeat sales, they've got this instant purchase capability that Magento released recently, one click, get things even faster, reducing checkout time, all the things that drive up repeat business. But also the personalization front is going to be key to be able to deliver, as you said, Markus, the relevance offers that we all want. >> Exactly. The great benefit of this marketplace concept is that since we have connected the different stocks of our retailers, we can offer much more product by this way than we could do it alone. So the offering of our 3,000 styles per season gets nearly unlimited to the end user. >> Limitless. We talk about limitless commerce. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for stopping by and having a chat with me today. We wish you good luck on the award nomination. I hear those are being given out tonight, so best of luck, and we hope to see you again on theCUBE soon. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, live from Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)