Why We Invested: Pack Digital
eCommerce brands and retailers live and die by their customers’ shopping experience.
Navigation is slow or confusing? Customers leave. Products are hard to find? Customers leave. Checkout crashes? Customers are mad…and probably leave.
And as social media sites — which are slick, fast, and media-rich — are increasingly the referral point for eCommerce traffic, there is tremendous pressure to level-up the shopping experience. Under the weight of all that content and growing product catalogs, things lag and break.
Pack Digital has a solution. Pack is a low-code platform for headless commerce.
Going “headless” means adopting an architecture that decouples a site’s front-end from its backend, and it has many benefits:
• makes sites faster and more responsive
• allows for a broader array of integrations with 3rd parties such as buy now pay later (BNPL) providers
• allows for full customization of the UI and UX
What does it look like out in the wild? Check out Cuts Clothing, Liquid I.V., or Truff. They were all built using Pack.
It has become quite clear that headless architectures are going to become standard for eCommerce sites, with both established legacy brands as well as upstart DTC brands moving to this model. According to a Wunderman Thompson report, 29% of large eCommerce companies (3000+ employees) already have implemented headless and a further 63% plan to adopt this structure in the next two years.
However, up till recently, implementing a headless front-end has required dedicated engineering and design teams that can build and maintain bespoke tech stacks, which has prohibited small and mid-sized merchants from adopting such technology.
Pack solves this. Their low-code, modular platform is incredibly easy to implement and maintain. It’s a true frontend-as-a-service that plugs directly into Shopify (and other eComm platforms soon), payment platforms, checkout tools, content management systems, and various other 3rd parties via API.
At Anthemis, we’re very interested in the embedded finance opportunities created by the shift to headless commerce. We see Pack’s front-end platform as an opportunity for brands and fintech partners to explore innovative payment and financing options. Their storefronts are essentially the digital real estate on which modern retailers are being built, which provides those retailers and Pack preferential control on everything from payment providers to pricing.
And so we’re very excited to announce our investment in Pack Digital’s Seed Round, alongside Alpaca and an amazing consortium of investors.
The powerful simplicity of the Pack platform is a direct result of the founding team’s experiences solving exactly these problems for some of the largest DTC brands in the world. Led by CEO Cory Cummings, CSO Andrew Pizula, and CTO Tyler Shambora, they have spent the last decade perfecting site architectures for eCommerce sites.
If you want to be part of that journey, Pack is hiring: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pack-digital-us_want-to-be-part-of-the-pack-contact-cassie-activity-6911800722317606912--bUE
