RTIH: What was the motivation for establishing the company?
SJ: My wife, Puneet Arora, and I have been long-time retail and technology leaders.
Punnett has over 20 years of experience developing enterprise products and solutions for banking, retail, telecommunications, media, airlines and hospitality.
He was the CTO of TIBCO Software, one of the largest integration companies.
I have more than a decade of experience in founding and consulting consumer retail startups and fashion brands and have led two retail startups responsible for digital marketing and consumer experience, one of which was acquired by theFind.
We’ve both seen how the retail industry is changing rapidly with the rise of e-commerce, but we know that the in-store experience will never go away.
To marry in-store and offline experiences, retailers are forced to donate disparate tools and “solutions” and, as a result, are integrating multiple tools from multiple suppliers.
We believe the solution to this challenge is a modular, microservices-based platform that helps global retailers, regardless of channel, manage their data and streamline all their operations in one place to create a unified, simple and secure customer experience.
RTIH: What has been the industry response so far?
SJ: The retail industry is excited about what the XY Retail platform can offer.
Fashion brands in 35 countries are using us to manage their warehouses, e-commerce, customers, products, inventory, orders and more.
Investors, CROs and CFOs love XY Retail because of its efficiency and ability to grow business.
Brand leaders and store teams love it because it allows them to see, engage with and serve their customers in ways they’ve never seen before.
RT: What is your biggest challenge?
SJ: With the dramatic digital transformation retailers have seen over the past couple of years, our belief that focusing on the needs of physical retail stores will continue to be successful has been counterintuitive and initially faced headwinds.
We have remained steadfast in our belief that experiential, luxury retail will always have a core element in people.
Now, most retailers have adopted our “physical” approach, integrating physical and digital retail channels to meet the needs of consumers in a modern environment.
RTIH: What is the biggest issue facing the omnichannel retail space today?
SJ: Omnichannel retailers are tasked with managing POS, e-commerce, ERP, customer and CRM across multiple platforms and solutions.
At the same time, consumers have high expectations for seamless, reliable, convenient and personalized shopping experiences, no matter where they interact with a brand (web, mobile, social media or in-store).
In addition, retailers need a way to capture, manage and understand consumer data to understand their customers’ buying behavior, purchasing decisions and trends for a better experience and more revenue.
Gaining a complete picture of customers’ shopping preferences and habits requires retailers to combine all their data across all channels. This is critical to inventory management and storage performance goals.
RTIH: What can we expect to see from you in the next 12 months?
SJ: We’re just getting started! We will use our funds to continue onboarding more customers and rolling out the XY platform in more countries around the world.
