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.
She concludes, “Makeover is an incredible little bundle of Stephan’s knowledge and take on the industry and has become a powerful marketing tool for us. It has spawned articles and quotes and all kinds of interest, and we’re just getting started.”
