Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.

Benjamin Spiegel is the Chief Digital Officer at Polywood, the outdoor furniture maker that turns recycled plastic into lumber and lumber into furniture on its own floor. The model is just-in-time: a checkout on the website triggers the lumber run in the right color, the build, the box, and the shipment, with no finished inventory in between.

In this conversation: why vertical integration cuts freight as much as it cuts waste, why Spiegel thinks this is the best time to be a creative, the difference between big-C creative ideas and small-c asset production, how his AI bill tripled while the creative headcount stayed flat, and the five consumer-persona agents his team shows work to before a human ever does.

What is next: helping people design outdoor spaces, a problem Spiegel says no AI tool handles yet because outside has no walls.

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.

Aman Advani is the co-founder and CEO of Ministry of Supply, the performance-fabric clothing brand he started with two engineers he met in school. Fourteen years in, the company runs direct to consumer on a hub of Shopify, Klaviyo, and a homegrown forecasting and purchasing engine called the Ministry Production System.

In this conversation: why every product starts from a problem statement (sweat stains, stiff fabric, dry cleaning), the email that told him it was 97 degrees in Atlanta and his jacket would arrive Tuesday, why he answers five customer emails a day himself, and his rule for AI in content: amplify the message, never manipulate it. First in class is the secret sauce and stays human. Best in class is everything else, and that is where the AI goes.

What is next: after fourteen years of clothing, Ministry of Supply is moving into bags.

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Recorded live at Shopware Partner Day in Austin, Texas on April 22, 2026.

Mark Stanley is Shopware's chief product and technology officer, where he looks after all product development. He walks through what is landing this year. Shopware's own native PaaS has just gone GA, highly opinionated and driven from the command line. An intelligence suite is in progress, bringing AI into bulk editing, CMS content generation and store data insights. And Nexus, an orchestration system for connecting Shopware instances to each other and to third party systems, goes GA at Shopware Community Day in Cologne.

His hot take is data sovereignty, and business model sovereignty with it. More SaaS providers want to hoover up as much data as they can get, which suits a merchant who wants one button to push. Merchants thinking further out want to keep control of where the business model lives and where the proprietary data sits. His advice is to work out what you would not want an LLM to be able to copy in two or three years, and protect that. The moats are changing.

On partners, he sees the job shifting away from shipping features and toward delivering outcomes, with tokens becoming the unit of outcome usage. On AI, he is most interested in developer tooling, where the first 80 percent of a build can happen in 20 percent of the time while the last 20 percent stays human work. And he thinks a portion of shopping stays tactile, digitally or physically, the way asking Siri to play something is a different experience from browsing Spotify.

On North America he calls it an underdog story. Shopware is the Linux to the Windows and the Android to the iOS, and the work is the ground game, the same way it was done in Europe fifteen years ago. Bring a case of beer, go on the road, get people to join the ride.

Shopware Community Day runs June 10 in Cologne. Shoptoberfest runs September 14 and 15 in Nashville.

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.

Sweetwater has a reputation that arrives before the box does. Ask any working musician and you get the same two details without prompting, the candy and the phone call.

Laura Smith is Vice President of Marketplaces at Sweetwater Sound, the nation's largest online musical instrument retailer, and hers is the job where that reputation is easiest to lose, because she is the one selling Sweetwater's products on somebody else's storefront.

She starts somewhere unglamorous. Consistency begins in the product data, and on a catalog as large as Amazon's the real risk is listing a product against the wrong page, one a retailer usually did not write. When the page is wrong, her team routes the fix back to the brand and will execute it on their behalf.

What she is most direct about is fulfillment. Sweetwater keeps its Amazon business through the third-party site specifically so it can control that, which means the guitars still go through a 55-point inspection, still sit in a humidity-controlled warehouse, and still get packed the same way. The warehouse never learns which channel the order came from, and customers who arrive through Amazon get routed back to Sweetwater's own service team.

On AI in content she answers yes, and then fills in the second half that usually goes missing. Humans first, because Sweetwater sells to musicians who research deeply before they buy. AI shows up as throughput rather than authorship. She also makes the case that Amazon is an opportunity rather than a competitor, and extends the same logic to LLMs and TikTok Shop without overselling how far along any of it is.

Guest: Laura Smith, Vice President of Marketplaces, Sweetwater Sound
Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.
To learn more about our at-event interviews, go to talk-commerce.com/events

John Riewerts leads product engineering at Acoustic, a marketing engagement company. He joins us on day three of eTail Boston to take apart a phrase every marketer uses and few define, bringing the audience closer to the brand, and to explain why the listening half of marketing is the half that gets underbuilt.

Riewerts frames the discipline as two tools. Marketers send messages, which becomes campaigning. And marketers listen, which means reading behavior, because as he puts it, no consumer ever sends a brand a message saying whether they like it. They answer through their actions instead.

He also walks through Acoustic AI, the company's new layer on top of the platform, and the argument behind it. Generative tools are only as good as the context they are given, so the value is in what the model gets to read. Beyond writing messages and building segments, Acoustic AI pushes unprompted recommendations when it spots repeat buyers slowing down, interest building in an out-of-stock product, unsubscribes spiking on one campaign, or consumer fatigue climbing.

He closes on four pillars, product, campaign, audience and behavioral intelligence, and a critique of the current tooling. Marketing automation is campaign-centric, and nobody lives in a single-campaign world.

Guest: John Riewerts, Lead Product Engineering, Acoustic
Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.
To learn more about our at-event interviews, go to talk-commerce.com/events

Mike Heilig is the general manager at Binary Anvil, a web development agency and systems integrator that has been running for 18 years, built mostly on Adobe Commerce, and has since branched into other platforms and a product of its own.

He takes on the SaaS promise directly. Moving to SaaS genuinely removes the hosting and patching burden, and then relocates the difficulty rather than deleting it, because business complexity does not go away. His fit test is simple. A very simple business may belong on SaaS. B2B requirements, complex catalogs and complex price lists probably do not. The mistake he sees merchants make is shopping for technology before writing down the business outcome they want.

The conversation turns to Flux, Binary Anvil's React and Next.js headless front end that attaches to an Adobe Commerce backend and supports B2C and B2B out of the box. For D&B Supply, a large farm and ranch retailer, rebuilding on Flux while keeping the Adobe Commerce backend moved site speed, conversions, organic traffic and search rankings, and cut roughly 57,000 dollars a year off upgrade cost. Heilig explains why decoupling the front end is what makes upgrades cheap, and credits Adobe for maintaining old APIs instead of deprecating them.

On AI mediated commerce he is patient rather than breathless. Structured data, machine readable documentation and clean APIs are the groundwork, the requirement is on the horizon rather than here, and the open question is whether shoppers are ready to hand a credit card to an agent at all.

Guest: Mike Heilig, General Manager, Binary Anvil

Leif Welch named his company after a music startup that failed inside a year, and he kept the name through the rebuild anyway, because the idea sitting underneath it, connecting buyers and sellers with more transparency than either of them was used to, had always been the part worth keeping. The first Jamloop was a marketplace for musicians to find new and used gear, with a social network for local players attached to it.

Jamloop is now a platform for brands and their agencies to advertise on streaming television. Welch describes it as a Facebook or Google Ads style platform for the connected TV world, with an analytics layer that tracks store visits, website visits, purchases, and whether the campaign earned a real return on ad spend.

Recorded on the eTail Boston floor ahead of his keynote, Welch previews the argument he is taking to the stage. Search and social are demand-capture channels running into saturation, and television has always been the thing that creates demand in the first place. He splits AI into two jobs, creative versioning and platform-level campaign operations, and closes with the 70-30 blueprint Jamloop is putting in front of advertisers now.

Guest: Leif Welch, Founder and CEO, Jamloop
Recorded live at eTail Boston, August 10 through 12, 2026.
To learn more about our at-event interviews, go to talk-commerce.com/events

Jeff Wender is Chief Revenue Officer at Minty. He opened with a term worth stealing: money maxing, which he describes as what shoppers have always done when costs are high and every dollar has to stretch further.

The number underneath his pitch is the one merchants already know and mostly ignore. Roughly 5% of people who land on an ecommerce site buy something. The other 95% are in discovery, moving between sites and comparing, and the brand has no idea who they are. Minty works that 95%, using a permissioned database of over 450 million connected devices to identify those shoppers and put an incentive in front of them.

On AI, Jeff refused to give an opinion and gave data instead. Minty's national holiday shopper survey found 78% of people expect to use AI in some form this holiday season, mostly for discovery rather than purchase. Their answer is Minty Promote, which syndicates a brand's products and incentives across the major LLMs so the brand is in the conversation when the recommendation gets made.

Also covered: the Shopify app and where the instrumentation sits, the Minty Ads retail media layer, and why full funnel matters more than any single tactic.

Chapters

(00:05) Introductions at eTail Boston
(00:14) Money maxing, and what it actually means
(01:12) The 5% who buy and the 95% who do not
(02:55) What Minty is hearing on the exhibit floor
(04:19) The 78% AI holiday number, and Minty Promote
(06:05) Minty App, Minty Ads, and what is next

Recorded live at eTail Boston 2026.