Bant Breen:
Gooten is a globally distributed production and logistics company transforming the way online brands manufacture and fulfill merchandise to their customers. Tell me a little bit more about Gooten, Mark. What attracted you to Gooten and to be part of this team that’s pushing it forward?
Mark Kapczynski:
When I was graduating from film school, kind of in the early days of the internet, the first business I set up was an E-commerce platform where back in the mid-early to mid-90s, you could sell products on the internet. Yahoo stores at the time were a kind of comparison. Now, it’d be Shopify and big commerce. I had built a business like that and sold that off in the early days. It’s kind of weird how I’ve had this relationship with E-commerce throughout my whole career. Whether it was building a platform, or when I went to work for Microsoft, who was helping the entertainment industry, sell Media, like streaming media, downloadable music, or downloadable movies in an E-commerce model. Then from there, I was working with Experian where we were selling free credit reports, I probably should have been doing that yesterday as well free. E-commerce has just been in my blood, I think in this indirect way. The opportunity to work with data, work with a high-growth startup, working e-comm especially right now where you’re just seeing so much growth. This was such a great, exciting opportunity.
Bant Breen:
What are the challenges that you’re seeing and facing on a day-to-day basis?
Mark Kapczynski:
I haven’t met my team in person. I’ve hired a whole marketing team since I started last year, and I haven’t met any of them in person at all. We don’t even live in the same city. Even to bring us all together now would require flights. We’re not doing that. Even to that level, all my teammates at the executive level I haven’t met either. I know Brian, the CEO, before COVID, and Maddie and the CFO, but that’s it. I haven’t met anyone else. That alone has presented a challenge and I think the biggest thing, especially for me, I consider myself more of a creative person in general. I love being in front of a whiteboard and being in a much more dynamic, creative brainstorming environment with my team. We have not found any good way to replicate that. It’s very forced. Even conversations over Zoom it’s like I talk, I have to then wait, you talk. There isn’t consistent banter because you then can’t hear each other, right? If we were all in one room, you could have more of that energy of like, “Okay, you go, you go, you go.” You’re updating a whiteboard and figuring stuff out. I think that’s one of the biggest things that I don’t even think we’ve tried lots of tools to try to help us.
Bant Breen:
What gives you joy right now from what you guys are working on?
Mark Kapczynski:
I think the biggest thing is just the sheer opportunity. There’s so much Greenfield opportunity in front of us. The fun part for me is how do we build ourselves up to go get that? There are so many different things we could do, which one should we do? Then how do we start making the strides to go do it? We know that the low-hanging fruit is the kind of the tactical things that we should be doing and executing on that. Then it’s the strategic things like describing the fashion industry. We may not see a lot of early business from those efforts like Q1 and Q2 of this year, but if we don’t start making the progress or sowing the seeds for that right now we won’t be ready. The fun part is being on the front edge, as you probably know things. Let’s go get those first wins and get the first deals and that tee up the rest of the business. For me, the fun part is like the mental chess match of “Okay, what are the different things we should be doing? Which beaches? Do we go store normally on kinda again, and go get those early wins?”
Bant Breen:
Mark, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back.
To see the full interview on the Uncaged YouTube channel, go to:
