SalesTechStar Interview with Yoram Givon, VP of Engineering at Recurate

How are point of sales solutions changing the retail experience today? Yoram Givon, VP of Engineering at Recurate highlights some key trends:

_________

Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Yoram, tell us about yourself and your journey in the tech market through the years, we’d love to hear about your new role at Recurate…

I’m joining Recurate with over 25 years of experience working for both big corporations and small startups (including companies like Stamp.com, VRBO, and Visa.) I’ve managed teams all over the world, focusing on scaling teams from a couple million dollars to hundreds of millions. I’m really excited to join Recurate in particular because the company is in a stage where it’s rapidly growing from a startup into a mature company that’s going to significantly impact the industry.

Take us through some of the latest innovations that are in-demand for resale operating platforms and how tools like Recurate are evolving to meet brand needs at the point of sale today?

To transform the resale market, it’s essential for tech platforms like ours to make it as easy as possible for buyers and sellers to participate in the circular economy. On the buyer’s side, we want the buying experience to be as smooth as the new product shopping experience in-store or online, and historically this hasn’t been true. Innovations like seller closets, favoriting, merchandising and visible seller ratings all make it easier for buyers to find what they are looking for in a trusted experience.

On the seller’s side, we want to focus on making it as easy as possible to list an item, so we are building tools to get better at matching items to a product catalog, regardless of where an item was originally purchased. If an item has been in a seller’s closet for a number of years, they may not know how much they paid for it or where exactly they got it. Being able to leverage Digital IDs, our high-end matching technology, or AI image searches to find all of the relevant information about the product will greatly reduce the barrier to entry for sellers.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Nick Mangiapane, CMO and Head of Partnerships at Commerce Signals

What kind of digital selling enhancements will become more crucial as brands work on establishing better end user journeys to drive both offline and online experiences?

The most important thing for a user journey is reducing the number of steps for a customer to take that journey. From a secondhand perspective, the biggest constraint is getting great supply in front of customers. So our goal is to build the technology that allows it to be as easy as possible for customers to get involved in secondhand. That is both, the enhancements from a seller listing and matching standpoint, also doing in-store takeback, making it so that every touchpoint a customer has with a brand offers an opportunity to engage with resale.

As resale and sale operating systems evolve to meet changing dynamics of today’s marketplace, how do you feel brands themselves should cope to keep up with training and skilling to ensure smooth operations?

It’s a true partnership between the brands who are focused on making high quality products and the technology providers that are focused on creating the technology to ensure a robust experience. Brands shouldn’t have to do things differently when they are launching resale, because the technology should be doing the work to unlock and optimize this channel for them. It’s facilitating another way for brands and retailers to engage with their customers and meet them where they’re at.

What are some of the current POS features (digital and offline) that you feel will become redundant over time?  

Any technologies that don’t take into account all of the channels with which a customer engages, will eventually become redundant. Both new and resale experiences will need to be omnichannel (in-store, online, on social media) to meet all of the ways that customers shop and want to interact. This is why we’ve taken such a strong omnichannel approach to how we are building resale alongside our brands–we want to be able to offer the buying and seller experience to customers at every touchpoint.

Read More: 8 Retail Innovation Trends Explored at the – Retail Technology Show 2023

Can you highlight more about the future of the B2B tech market and in what ways you expect to see it grow?

We know the global secondhand apparel market last year was $177B last year and I truly believe in the next few years it will grow many times over. It’s already grown so much in terms of consumer to consumer, but I think B2B companies like ours will help accelerate that growth exponentially. I even think resale will fully integrate itself into the B2B market, as companies start to offer resold or repurposed items to other businesses.