Serial
ecommerce entrepreneur Stephan Schambach not only invented the online shopping cart,
but he also keeps reinventing it.
In 1995,
Schambach created the first-ever standard software for online shopping.
In 2004,
he offered the first ecommerce solution on the cloud.
In early
2014, he noticed an increase in web traffic coming from mobile phones that
mushroomed to more than half of all customer traffic by the end of the year.
In
response, Schambach founded NewStore, Inc., in early 2015. A short time later,
he created the first Mobile Retail Platform software to solve the omnichannel
problem facing so many retailers and brands. Its goal? To help them deliver an
extraordinary end-to-end shopping experience for their consumers entirely from
a mobile perspective.
NewStore
might only be two-plus years old, but it’s expanding as fast as the mobile
retail industry itself. With offices in Boston, New York City, and the German
cities of Berlin, Hannover, and Erfurt, NewStore’s director
of corporate communications, Casey Antonelli, says, “This start-up is on
steroids.”
About a
year ago, after considering his boss’s undisputed position as a thought leader in
the mobile retail industry, Schambach’s chief marketing officer told him he
should write a book. Never one to let grass grow under his feet, Schambach
published Makeover: How Mobile Flipped
the Shopping Cart (and What to Do about It) in June of 2017.
“Our CMO
really pushed him to do this,” Casey explains. “The goal was not to sell books.
The goal was to increase our account-based marketing, or ABM, to reach new
retail clients. We have a very targeted outreach to specific retailers. Since
publishing the book this past June, that outreach includes Makeover.”
While Makeover is available for purchase online,
NewStore published the book to give it away to individuals already in the
start-up’s sales pipeline and to potential new prospects.
For
example, Schambach hosts quarterly dinners for CEOs of select retailers
alongside a high-profile co-host. The purpose of these dinners isn’t to push NewStore’s
platform but to share ideas.
Casey
notes, “Wrapping up the incredible round-table discussions that ensue by giving
each CEO a copy of the book is extremely helpful, given how much information there
is to absorb regarding retail’s transformation to mobile.”
This
volume of information and the disruption this transformation is causing led Schambach
to approach a publishing services company and use the services of a professional writer
to craft Makeover.
“Stephan
is constantly traveling from Berlin to Boston to New York,” Casey reflects. “It
was incredibly helpful to have a dedicated writer to help put the book
together.”
She
adds, “We knew what the content was, and the publisher and writer helped us
figure out how to make it digestible. From there, we had a great marketing team
at NewStore to help us execute. Our CMO and project manager worked with the
publisher and did a huge amount of work to get it printed and created
physically.”
Having
all the content related to mobile in one highly readable place has also helped
Casey communicate mobile’s transformation and NewStore’s Mobile Retail Platform
software to the press.
