Navigating the Future of E-commerce: Lessons from Ember's Agile Integration Journey

In today's rapidly evolving e-commerce landscape, businesses face the challenge of keeping up with growth and staying agile and adaptable to meet changing market demands. Temperature-controlled drinkware company Ember Technologies started as an e-commerce business before rapidly expanding into global markets, including through retail partnerships. Ember’s quick expansion highlights the importance of maintaining flexibility and adaptability in the face of rapid growth. In this webinar transcript, Zach Horton, senior director of logistics, supply & demand planning, and Ebru T. Saglam, principal product marketing manager at Celigo delve into Ember’s journey to building a future-proof global e-commerce business and the role of integration in facilitating a seamless consumer experience. Maia Jenkins: Hi everyone, and welcome to this webinar on “How Ember Technologies is Building a Future-Proof Global E-Commerce Business.” My name is Maia Jenkins, I'm an editor at CGT and I thank you for joining us. This webinar is hosted by CGT and presented in partnership with Celigo. Over the course of the conversation today, we'll learn about Ember's growth journey and how the company is leveraging technology to automate and scale for more agile, customizable commerce. Ember Technologies provides smart mugs through multiple digital storefronts, across different marketplaces and retail stores across the globe, and is growing at such a rapid rate year over year. The company needed a robust operational infrastructure that could quickly scale to account for this growth and handle new requirements, while also remaining flexible, agile, and open to change - a journey we'll be hearing about today. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce our speakers. With us to explore these topics and trends, we have Ebru Saglam and Zach Horton. Thank you so much for joining us, it’s great to have you both with us. May you each share what you do at your respective companies? Zach Horton: Hi everyone, I'm Zach Horton. I've been with Ember for about six years now and my first role was actually customer service. I've been very fortunate to grow from the early days in a tech startup and find myself, today, leading logistics, fulfillment, supply and demand planning. It brings everything into one group and one function, it’s very collaborative. I look forward to speaking on those topics. Ebru Saglam: Hi everyone, my name is Ebru Saglam. I'm the principal product marketing manager at Celigo, focusing on retail and e-commerce solutions. I've been in the e-commerce space for the past 10 years, including helping to drive value for businesses through technology solutions, and running my own consumer goods business. I'm excited to discuss with Zach how Ember was able to future-proof its global e-commerce business. Jenkins: Brilliant. With that, I'll hand it over to you. Saglam: I would like to start by giving a quick intro into Celigo. For those who haven't heard of us, Celigo is an iPaaS, integration platform as a services company. What that means is it helps integrate business applications to automate and optimize business processes. The platform serves both technical and business users. Technical teams love it because they can build complex integrations at scale, but then on the other side, business teams, through our UI, AI, and large library of prebuilt integrations — especially strong coverage on the e-commerce side — are empowered to easily deploy, monitor, and manage integrations without dependency on those technical teams. Our customers include some very well-known, mid-market and enterprise brands, Ember Technologies being one of them. If you look at the numbers, today on the platform, more than 130,000 business processes are being actively automated and every month we are processing more than 15 billion records. That provides some insights on the strength of the platform. Then, last but not least, we're also highly rated by customers on platforms like G2, Gartner and others. Horton: A little bit about Ember Technologies. We have set a goal to revolutionize the way that consumers can eat and drink. We're a temperature control technology company, which has been in the market since 2016, founded by Clay Alexander. Over the years we've been fortunate to be named as one of the best inventions. We've been award-winning and have seen our product grow massively over the last few years. We're now global in 27-plus countries, more than 10,000 retail doors, and trying to focus on that expansion to get our products in the hands of all consumers. It's a product that you don't know you need until you don't have it — we're all addicted here at Ember. Saglam: It’s amazing to hear how Ember Technologies is selling globally across multiple storefronts, multiple marketplaces, and all these retail stores. You are growing so fast, it seems like 100% year-over-year. Hearing all about this, how did it all get started? Were your products at brick-and-mortar stores initially, or did you start off with e-commerce and then move into brick-and-mortar? Can you provide some background? Horton: Ember's first product was on the market in 2016. We did start on e-commerce on our own at ember.com. We were very fortunate, back in 2016, to have a partnership with Starbucks stores across the U.S. It was a nice mix of getting outreach in person, as well as driving the e-commerce business. Since then, in 2017, we kicked off a global expansion in retail with Apple being a big partner that helped us expand into those 27-plus countries. From there, retail has been a great avenue to drive sales and get awareness in front of people. However, the e-commerce business has always been a focus, trying to maintain 30+% of our market share internally. We've always kept the focus on the customers, what the core audience really wants, and listening to them. Saglam: That's amazing. As a coffee snob myself, I have been eyeing Ember mugs at some Apple retail stores, and am very familiar with the product. Growing so quickly, and then also having to expand into global markets, this must have been a difficult journey. Typically, when I talk with e-commerce businesses, what I hear is that as sales grow, it is not easy to scale operations at the same pace. I can imagine with an international business, the challenges probably multiply. For Ember, what were some of the business challenges that came together with the high growth and international expansion? How did you end up working with an integration platform? Horton: As a startup environment and a very small team, everyone's bootstrapping — wearing multiple hats is the cliché you'll hear. There were a lot of manual processes in the early days at Ember, and we all did our best to make it work. One of the biggest challenges to solve was efficiency and system communication. There's one solution, which is downloading a spreadsheet, working through it manually, uploading, and copy-paste. It just does not scale. Finding a partner to bring that together was critical. We onboarded an ERP system, which was enterprise-level. It was a little early, but with that system we found a lot of challenges and realized we needed to connect all of our platforms as well — whether it be Shopify or some of our retail partners — to make sure our communication across systems was strong. Finding Celigo was a critical path. We did have an out-of-the-box solution from the ERP provider, but it was limited in what we could do. Growing into countries and different markets — the EU, the UK, Asia-Pacific — there were a lot of limitations that we ran into. Finding Celigo helped us connect all the platforms and make sure that system communication was strong. It brought us back to the core of Ember, which is the customer. Making sure the customers were getting the speed in communication, driving success to them, and being proactive instead of reactive was a large change that we were looking for with the system integration. That's a good place to start. Saglam: When you started the integration journey, or future-proofing the business, did you have any specific business goals in mind? Horton: Improving things like on-time delivery, or some of the metrics that we track was important. If sales orders are missing in the system, it's impossible to deliver those on time. Making sure nothing falls through the cracks is one thing — and the system has been crucial in that sense — but also communication, letting customers know their order is placed, has shipped, and driving those communications proactively. The consumer base nowadays is looking for speed, and with the Amazons of the world taking over the market, it's important to match those metrics. With the system behind it, it's easy to see how manual processes do not work to scale, to that speed. A system has to be in place to connect the dots. The biggest processes were proving on-time delivery, and avoiding any backlogs with orders due to systematic delays. From a revenue standpoint, we wanted to make sure our systems contained all of the orders, all the revenues, and accounted for everything correctly. It's become a mission-critical area for the business and has grown over the years. Saglam: Did you roll out the automations all at once across global sales channels, or was it a staggered process? Horton: It was a bit phased. Over time we learned what problems existed. There are a lot of nuances, but I personally have some bad memories of doing everything manually at the beginning of onboarding the ERP system, and we're never going to go back to that. It took too much time and the time that we spent was not worth what was actually happening, so we did phase it. It started with e-commerce and rolled into retail and bringing in all of the sales orders through one platform. Saglam: Talking to a lot of companies, the top benefits highlighted with integration or automation of business processes is as you said — scaling operations, improving operational efficiency — which brings along saving costs. Improving customer experiences is also a great benefit because with streamlined business processes, customers get a better quality of service with delivery, fast shipments, and being able to track staff, receive the right product at the right time, etc. When you think of your journey at Ember, how has the business evolved with all the integrations and automations in place? Do you feel the business is future-proof? Horton: We've taken a big step to be proactive and being reactive — you lose trust with the customer, and it goes back to that. Building trust, customer retention is important and it only takes one terrible experience for a customer to put us to the side. So building that trust, making sure customers know what's happening and when, with Celigo integrations, now systems are communicating to each other and there's a lot of things we've solved, there's not a lot of ways for things to slip through the cracks. From a business perspective, myself leading a team, it helps to be able to have the peace of mind to step back and think strategically, to not have to worry about the day-to-day processing. We have so much trust in the system now and it continues to build that customer efficiency, customer speed, and retention. Saglam: That's great to hear. Do you now feel like your teams have more control over the integrations? How do you manage everything? Do you have technical teams in place or do you do it yourselves? Can you talk a bit about what that looks like for you? Horton: Ember does not have a technical development team. I, myself, am not a developer, although sometimes I wish I was. There's a lot of leaning on third parties — Celigo in this case — and working with an outside team. For me and my team, we've trusted Celigo as an extension of our team. Regardless of the vendor-customer relationship, we think of Celigo as a team. We have a significant amount of increased control and look at different logs to make sure that orders are processed correctly. There's a lot of reporting and metrics that we can now drive against the data sets that we process between web services. It's a huge benefit for us, and not having to dig through to find a needle in a haystack is a big part of it. Every day we can look to see what's going on and make sure that orders are processing, customers are being notified. Our teams have a ton of control in that area. Going back to the trust topic, we do trust the integration. We've tested it extensively with the support of the Celigo development team. Again, I can talk about the functional design, but developing a solution is where a third party like Celigo comes in to build it out. Saglam: With e-commerce, we are all witnessing the rapidly changing market. This year, there are new trends, last year it was different, and then the purchasing behavior also changed. In the end, it impacts businesses like yourself. Your company is still growing, so I'm sure there will be new business strategies coming into the picture. With those, you’ll probably be facing new challenges on the operational side. What are your plans on tackling them? Do you feel like you have the right tools in place to be addressing all the new challenges coming your way? Horton: You bring up a really good point, Ebru. The market is constantly changing. All businesses, like Ember, are trying to react and make sure that we make the right decisions — but it's a forecast, right? We don't know what's going to happen a year from now, so we're making our best educated guesses. For Ember and the partnership with Celigo, we trust that our systems won't be the bottleneck anymore. We've broken down that wall and have a way to see what happens with the data and bring that into the ERP system. We’re using that to our advantage right now. We're constantly focused on growth, and now we're capable and confident bringing in new customers, knowing that the system is built behind the scenes. We won't face the same tactical bottlenecks that get in the way when you're trying to expand and grow a business like Ember. Again, mainly focused on the e-commerce side of things, we have to be efficient and it keeps the peace of mind. I can sleep at night knowing that our systems are working and processing things effectively. It takes the manual efforts out of the process and we as a company can step back and focus on those growth pieces. Saglam: Do you see advantages with centrally managing all your sales channels through an ERP and consulting all integrations on a single platform when you look at your previous approaches? Can you share some of your learnings there, because I'm sure many companies are facing similar challenges today? Horton: It's a good perspective to take. In the past, Ember had multiple systems between a sales platform to ERP and the ERP out to the warehouse. Maximizing both sides of those is important. You want a full circle integration that's populating all the information in the right way. For Ember, ERP systems can be very powerful, but it takes a strong level of integration and connection. No ERP out-of-the-box is ready to go. Building connections in place between some of those external systems. For example, Shopify has to be really solid and automated. It's challenging too because as a very small team, we do everything we can to bootstrap and get things done. Having a single platform has brought efficiency. We've let go of a couple other platforms because this integration has taken hold on our processes, allowing our team to step back and not have to worry about five different connectors — we can focus on one being Celigo. To dovetail on that, systems are very powerful, but it goes back to the team that helps to produce and build. Working with everyone on the development team at Celigo has been a huge learning experience for me. I often think back and wish I took computer science classes in the past to know some of this information myself, but it's been great to have the team support and build out surefire integrations. Saglam: Can you also let us know which marketplaces are you selling with Celigo, or which storefronts and what systems you are currently connecting to your ERP? Horton: Right now we're connecting Shopify Plus, which manages our global e-commerce business. We do have multiple stores, which is a big nuance. A U.S. store is different from a Canada store, and you'd want to market to those customers differently. We currently have five stores: U.S., Canada, the UK is split off from Europe, and then Asia-Pacific is the fifth one. Being able to specialize those integrations based on address information and customer data has been key. The other side of it is returns. We use Happy Returns and Loop Returns, both platforms to bring customers an easy way to bring anything back if they're unhappy, or to provide feedback as well. We always want to learn from customers. We've even taken it a step further to integrate some of the corporate sales business. We have a large corporate sales gifting business that's dedicated to B2B, but now we're offering those types of customers a way to simply purchase and bring those orders in. It is through Shopify, but it's a different store setup, so it's more of a backend management, order management way of doing the business. Again, Celigo brings that in. We're working on the outside connection to the warehouse, which has been tested to 3PL Central, which is where our WMS. All the warehouse teams that we work with have a straight path into the data and information so that they know what SKUs to pick, what quantities, what the order information is for the customer, and nothing is getting missed along the way — we're not shipping to the wrong location, we're always shipping the right product, trusting that those UPCs can be the safeguard there for everything. Full circle, all the way through Shopify, all the way to the warehouse, and then back into SAP. It's been fun to build out the SAP integrations together. Saglam: Since you're now familiar with all the capabilities of an iPath integration platform as a service, do you see more potential to automate different processes across your organization? Do you have any plans for the future? Horton: We absolutely do. One large one that we are starting to bridge the gap into now is EDI. A lot of the connections we've built so far have been API builds. For all the big box retailers of the world, they're not going to change their processes and they're using EDI structures to build purchase orders and notification ASNs. We’re going into that realm now with the Celigo team to build an EDI connection for our retail and again, bring everything under one roof. For the team, it simplifies too because we don't have to learn different processes to process different orders, whether it's a different type of order or a different customer, it's the same process. Our team can learn one process flow and be efficient across different orders. Saglam: That's awesome to hear about everything you're already doing and are planning to do in the future. Do you have any other tips or recommendations you would like to share with the audience? What would help them, maybe future-proofing their business, or scaling operations further with growth? Horton: The biggest challenge is not to be afraid to ask for help. There's a lot of smart vendors out there, like Celigo, and that can teach yourself, your team how to be efficient and give best practices in the market. Building connections is sometimes complicated, but Celigo has helped me and my team test, trained us how to watch the error logs, and things like that to make sure we're informed to make those decisions. My biggest recommendation is to lean into your vendor, lean into a Celigo, and ask for help and ask for training, ask for guidance — don't be afraid to take that risk. Saglam: To summarize some of the key learnings and takeaways from Ember's journey, hoping other businesses can leverage these when future proofing their global businesses: Companies experiencing high growth should not let operations become a bottleneck. They should automate and optimize business processes [inaudible] and be able to scale with that growth. When building a commerce infrastructure that will serve as the pipeline for moving data across the tech stack. Businesses need to think about the future and invest in a platform that will be able to address changing business needs based on changing business strategy and the changing market. Many platforms out there require heavy developer or tech team involvement and this might again, cause a bottleneck with the integration and automation project and picking a business-friendly integration platform to start with, it'll help business users take control of integrations. Jenkins: Thank you both for that interesting conversation. It's always exciting to hear the journey of a high growth business as it moves towards becoming super agile. There's a lot of lessons that we can all take from that as well. Thank you Zach for sharing, and Ebru for asking such great questions. I do have a couple of questions here. Zach, you speak about the system and then ERP, are these separate applications? Are they different platforms? Horton: First, I think of ERP as our system at Ember. It's the fundamental system that we track everything within, but with Celigo, we've connected systems such as Shopify Plus and 3PL Central, which is a warehouse management system that connects to our warehouse team whose boots are on the ground. It’s connecting all of those systems, but ERP and system for me are one in the like. Jenkins: That leads to this next question: which SAP are you integrating with and which modules within that ERP? Horton: SAP, multiple different options. Ember is currently using Business ByDesign, which is the cloud-based platform — it's been a learning experience. It's a relatively new ERP platform from SAP. The modules that we're using within SAP ByDesign are everything logistics-related from sales orders through to outbound deliveries. The specific flow is sales orders to customer demand — you create a delivery proposal, then you're sending a 3PL request out to the warehouse. Each step along the way has to connect to a specific outside system to communicate the information. Then, once the warehouse ships the order physically, we get an outbound delivery notification, which contains the tracking information and warehouse transaction ID. It helps us be safe in an audit because we have the paper trail all the way through the order. From there, we're taking that outbound delivery out of SAP ByDesign and populating a tracking notification back into Shopify Plus. That notifies the customer that their order has shipped, here's the tracking number, and provides them a link to click, a one-click link to track it on FedEx, UPS, DHL, whatever the platform might be. Hopefully that helps. Jenkins: Ebru, does Celigo support integration with all major e-commerce platforms? Saglam: All major e-commerce platforms, marketplaces, major ERP systems, they're all supported through pre-built connectors and also templatized use cases on the platform. Beyond that, as long as there's a level of connectivity, integrations can be built for optimized and automated business processes. We are also in the process of releasing connectors for social and search channels these days. Anything major is already supported and then anything beyond that can be supported as well, to summarize. Jenkins: Zach, is Ember connecting the EDI platform to their ERP via Celigo? Horton: Yes and no. We have an EDI partner right now, but EDI is built on the specific documents that you are going to receive from retail partners. For example, an 850 is a purchase order. Our goal is to use Celigo as the receiver of that 850 document, and then use the Celigo platform to translate the information into the SAP ByDesign format. That gives Ember the tools to process the order, communicate internally with sales teams, and effectively communicate back out to that retailer with some other documents. 856 is an ASN. You want to tell the retail partner when it's shipping, what shipping, what's the tracking number, the load IDs, that type of thing. Our goal is to have Celigo manage the incoming, as well as the outgoing messages from the documents for EDI. Jenkins: Thank you very much. In terms of iPaaS, is Celigo an e-commerce iPaaS, Ebru? Saglam: Celigo... I'll say yes and no. Celigo is an industry agnostic platform. It can automate any business process enterprise wide, so e-commerce, software or services. Any app across any vertical, any industry can be integrated on the platform. Beyond e-commerce, we have today’s customers automating HR, IT services, management, data warehousing, marketing related processes. Having said all that, Celigo is the iPaaS today with the broadest library for pre-built e-commerce integrations, and know-how on best practices for e-commerce use cases that are embedded into pre-built integrations. It makes it a great choice as an e-commerce iPaaS. Jenkins: Wonderful, thank you. Zach, do you have any commentary related to the iPaaS learning path, for the Ember team? Horton: I mean, I've learned a ton and passed that on to my team. We've been as specific as having weekly meetings to test and learn through the different problems that we face, and there's always nuance when you're connecting two systems. And so different translations for this field goes here, but it's been fun to see the backend. And now when I log into Celigo, I can actually work with the code and make little tweaks to kind of replicate those integrations and something we plan for in the future as we expand into new markets. Now that we have that kind of foundational knowledge, I don't have to go back to develop a new scope with Celigo because they trained me to duplicate, replicate, and make those minor tweaks to make it effective in new ways, which has been really fun. And sometimes it's overwhelming looking at large scripts and things like that. For me it's fun at least, but finding different nuances and fixing things has been a blast. Jenkins: Thank you both for sharing that. Zach, for a company that's say, on day zero of this journey to becoming more agile and future-proof, what words of advice can you leave us with today? Horton: I've found a lot of success in first taking a step back and drawing a flow chart of what the business wants. What do we as Ember want to see? We brought those types of randomized flow charts to Celigo and we don't even know if it's possible to develop in certain cases, but bringing that functional thought we want this to work this way. Then, ask Celigo for support to design an architecture that would support this is how this has to flow. They might even come back with, doing this a different way and it makes sense and you agree and handshake and build it out, I would encourage any companies that are interested in working with Celigo or building an iPaaS solution into their process, design it functionally. Don't be afraid to. You don't have to use big words or any development jargon, but tell Celigo what you want and ask for their help and in return, how would you design this to really work through the same lens? So we found it to be fun and a lot of solutions have come from that. Jenkins: When I ask this question, a lot of people say, I wish I was on day zero because it would be a fresh start. That's great words of advice to leave us on, I think. Ebru, would you like to add anything to what Zach has said here? Saglam: Zach gave a great overview and great recommendations to the audience here. I just would like to thank Zach for his insights and sharing his knowledge with all of us today. Jenkins: With that, just a reminder that the recording will be available in a couple of days on our website, and we will be emailing it to participants today. We really thank you all for attending, and we thank our sponsor as well, Celigo, and wishing you all a great rest of your day.

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