SalesTechStar Interview with Stephanie Lemmerman, CFO at ReCharge

Stephanie Lemmerman, CFO at ReCharge shares a few thoughts on evolving ecommerce trends in this quick chat:

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Hi Stephanie, we’d love to hear about your journey through the years…tell us more about ReCharge and your role there.

ReCharge is a leading provider of subscription management software for e-commerce. Merchants of all sizes use our billing and payment management solutions to grow their business by increasing customer lifetime value and reducing customer churn. I joined ReCharge last June as CFO working closely with the management team running all financial and legal, most recently raising $277 million in growth capital. Prior to ReCharge, I was EVP of Finance at Headspace. Prior to Headspace, I spent 7 years at Activision Blizzard.

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How are you seeing trends change for the use of subscription / ecommerce platforms today?

We saw e-commerce accelerate significantly in 2020, with many brick and mortar stores pivoting to offer their products through subscriptions as a result of the pandemic. ReCharge’s growth reflects massive adoption, both by consumers and merchants seeking the convenience and reliability of e-commerce subscriptions. In fact, we saw 91% subscriber growth last year in all categories of subscriptions. 

How according to you can brands plan more seamless online journeys for their customers; a few basic practices that should always be thought of?

ReCharge addresses the numerous nuanced needs of the subscription ecommerce market and offers a fully-featured product that uniquely enables both the smallest merchants and largest brands to easily adopt and scale with their platform. We build tools that help merchants better manage subscriptions and better communicate and strengthen their relationships with customers. From our experience of powering subscriptions for nearly 20 million subscribers across 15,000 merchants, we’ve found a huge priority for merchants is fostering direct relationships with their customers. ReCharge helps these brands to grow by allowing them to easily add subscriptions offerings to their business, ultimately turning one-time transactions into loyal, repeat customers. 

Can you talk about some of the biggest game changing ecommerce platforms and innovations you’ve been observing from around the world?

As customers seek digital-first solutions, they are looking to engage with brands on social and messaging platforms like Shopify, Instagram Shopping, Twilio and MessageBird. We offer a tool called ReChargeSMS, a text-based customer experience tool that allows merchant’s customers to manage all transactional aspects of their subscription currently available through ReCharge, simply via SMS. We also offer an API-first approach to product development for brands to create better reporting and analytics, fulfillment, loyalty programs, trigger-based emails and more, allowing a high-level of customization.

How do you feel platforms such as this will evolve in future and what will drive demand for more innovations and what kind?

We’ll always continue evolving our platform with the goal of making payments as seamless as possible and enabling merchants to build sustainable, growing businesses. Specifically, this means investing heavily in product development, providing our merchants with world-class support, and growing our various go-to-market functions. This is just the beginning. Seeing the shift in the market with more brands pivoting to the subscription model, the demand is exponential and the market is massive. We can help companies of all sizes establish and scale their e-commerce business. Right now, much of our business today is based in North America but with the new capital, we are targeting expansion into other geographic markets, specifically Europe. 

A few thoughts on what you feel today’s business leaders need to do differently to drive more business success.

Find your niche and commit to it. ReCharge identified the subscription ecommerce opportunity very early on and for years we have been singularly focused on building the best platform to meet the growing needs of merchants.  We have also really obsessed about adding value for our merchants and taking care of our merchants. These focus areas have made us the clear leader in powering ecommerce subscriptions and we will continue to take significant share in a fast-growing market.

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