I just updated my LinkedIn profile so I thought I had better get a post up on the blog!
After two and a half years I am leaving Home Depot this Friday to be the Director of Ecommerce for www.astralbrands.com.
So who is Astral Brands?
” Astral Brands is an innovator in the creation and management of consumer lifestyle brands with a business offering that is focused on two core sectors: Astral Health and Beauty and Astral Foods (featuring gourmet food items and large-scale perishable shipping). The Company was established in 1978 and operated as a public company until it was acquired and privatized in 1999 by Christie and Robert Cohen. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Astral Brands has 350 employees in North America”
I am going to be heading up the Ecommerce operations for the Health and Beauty division:
On October 17th, 2005 I joined The Home Depot as the User Experience manager for Homedepot.com. It was a big change as the first five years of my career had been spent on the IT side but now I was making the transition to the “business” side. I worked for Greg Foglesong who was the Director of Homedepot.com at the time. Greg was a great mentor and friend during my time at Home Depot and six years later he would hire me again at Carters.
As the user experience manager for homedepot.com, I was responsible for everything from home page to checkout. There was a digital marketing team that focused on driving traffic, but as soon as users hit the site it was my job to ensure a great shopping and eCommerce experience. After checkout, our supply chain and customer service teams would take over to complete the full customer life cycle. Since I sat in the middle of both teams, I got a lot of exposure to all aspects of the eCommerce business at homedepot.com.
In addition to the marketing team, I also worked very closely with the technology organization to implement new features and functionality. A key reason that Greg hired me was to help hold the technology team accountable to the business as I had the development background and technical skills to “speak their language”.
The New Homedepot.com
When I started at the end of 2005 Homedepot.com was running a very old version of the Broadvision platform. It was well past its end of life and with the explosive growth of sales on the site we desperately needed a modern eCommerce platform. The site barely made it through the 2005 and 2006 holiday seasons! Prior to me starting, Home Depot had selected IBM’s Websphere as the next generation platform we would migrate to. For the next 18 months, I would live and breathe all things Websphere as my primary focus was the relaunch of Homedepot.com on the new platform. It was a massive project to replace the entire technology stack of the site and there were no shortage of challenges along the way. In June of 2007, we launched the new site and it was a proud moment to see it go live!
After we launched the new site, I started to think about the next steps of my career. The Home Depot is a really big organization and some of the bureaucracy started to weigh on me. I also wanted to get more exposure to the marketing and supply chain sides of eCommerce. In January of 2008, I resigned from The Home Depot and joined Astral Brands as the Director of eCommerce.
In June of 2004, I was promoted to eCommerce Development Manager at Gardener’s Supply. As part of this promotion, I took on management responsibilities for the eCommerce development team. In addition, I also stepped into a more strategic role of defining the road map for the future of eCommerce technology at Gardner’s Supply.
Gardeners.com had been running on the same homegrown platform for a long time. It was really starting to show its age, and we knew that we needed to consider alternatives and migrate to a new platform. In 2004, we started considering the different options and started holding meetings with potential vendors. During this review process, I also received a cold call from Mary Ann Charlton “Mac” at Demandware. At the time, Demandware was a very small company with only a handful of clients. I was impressed with the initial conversation we had and so we added them to the RFP.
After a long and exhaustive evaluation process, we ended up selecting Demandware to be the new eCommerce platform for the Garders.com site. It was a leap of faith for us at the time but we believed in the technology and team behind it. Gardner’s Supply was the first big client win for Demandware and over the next 10 years they went on to become one of the most dominant eCommerce platforms in the industry. In February of 2004 Salesforce acquired Demandware for $2.8B and it is now part of the “Commerce Cloud” offering. Gardeners.com is still running Demandware/Salesforce 15 years later!
We spent most of 2005 working on the build out and implementation of the new site with Demandware. It was a great project but unfortunately I would not get to see the new site launch as an event that summer would have a significant impact on my career path.
While I was working full time at Gardeners.com, I was also a competitive cyclist who had aspirations of becoming a professional cyclist. In July of 2005, I had a cycling accident where I broke my arm, that ended my racing season. It was after that accident that I started to reevaluate my career path, and made two difficult decisions. The first, was that I abandoned the idea of becoming a professional cyclist! Second, I decided that for my career to continue to progress at the trajectory that I wanted I would have to leave Vermont.
In September of 2005 I made the extremely difficult decision to leave Gardner’s Supply and Vermont to join The Home Depot as the User Experience Manager for homedepot.com in Atlanta. Georgia. As I write this 15 years later, this decision still ranks as the most difficult decision I have had to make in my career!
In June of 2003 I joined Gardener’s Supply as an eCommerce Web Developer. Gardener’s Supply was established in 1983 by Will Rapp in Burlington Vermont. It was a classic catalog company, that was transforming its business model to adapt to the growth of eCommerce. While the majority of revenue came from the catalog, the eCommerce portion was the fastest growing part of the company and everybody could see it was the future of the business.
The eCommerce development team was part of the IT organization at Gardener’s Supply, which was pretty typical back in 2003. It was a small team of about eight of us and I reported to Chris Thompson the CTO. There was only one other eCommerce developer so it was a really small development team! I worked closely with my IT colleagues on all the back end plumbing but I also spent a lot of time with the eCommerce marketing team that was led by Max Harris. Max was a great mentor to me and had a pivotal influence on my career. I credit most of my early eCommerce marketing knowledge to Max!
Gardener’s Supply was a Microsoft shop like Burton so all my development work was in Classic ASP and Visual Basic. Since we were a small team, I got involved in all aspects of the eCommerce business. This was an incredible opportunity at such an early point in my career. I was only 25 years old and I was owning large portions of development for a $50m+ business! Coming from Burton, which was very “front end” heavy, I leaned more in that direction while the other developer focused more on the “back end” order processing side of the business. I worked closely with Roland Ludlam the lead designer and together we worked on almost every major site initiative in 2003 and 2004 for gardeners.com. We were a great team and built things like “Plant Finder” and “Cushion Finder” that allowed customers to easily shop the site.
After working at CSC, I joined Burton Snowboards as a Web Developer on February 26, 2001.
Working at Burton was truly a dream come true. I started snowboarding in 5th grade and got my first Burton Snowboard in 7th grade. If you had asked me in high school, name the one company you want to work for some day it would have been Burton Snowboards. I joined Burton in the winter of 2001, along with Brad Alan a college friend from BC who had graduated a year earlier than me. We were both in technology consulting and avid snowboarders so it was a great opportunity for both of us.
Before 2001, Burton had outsourced development of burton.com to an outside agency. I was part of the team that was hired to bring this work in house for the launch of the 2002 season on burton.com. We were a small group of developers and designers that rebuilt burton.com from the ground up each season to launch in August. We were a Microsoft shop, so all web development work was done in ASP/SQL/HTML. I learned a lot in this role, and got to build some cool applications including the very first “board finder” launched on burton.com.
In the early days of Burton.com, the site served as a customer facing catalog to support the dealer network. Burton did not want to allow online ordering for consumers but there was an interest in developing a B2B site. In 2002, Rich Sturim and I worked on building the first dealer.burton.com eCommerce site.
Working at Burton was an incredible experience. I loved the company and culture and learned a lot from the more senior developers on the team. We worked some long hours but we also had a lot of fun. If it snowed more than a foot, Jake expected the whole company to be at the mountain riding! During the winter we would hit the slopes in the morning, get a few runs in, and then head into work.
While I loved the company, a great opportunity presented itself and on May 27th, 2003 I left Burton to join the Gardeners.com team as an eCommerce Developer.
I started as an Associate Consultant at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) on October 2nd, 2000. There were a number of summer jobs before this but this was my first job after graduating and what I consider the start of my career. Before I get into what I did at CSC a little history on how I ended up here.
I went to Boston College and majored in Economics with a minor in Information Systems. In addition to my classes, I also did a lot of computer work outside of school. I built computers in my dorm room, developed a small business website, launched superwebmen.com with my roomates, and was a computer consultant to a BC alum in the hedge fund business.
I started my job search in the fall of my senior year at BC. The dot com frenzy was in full force and it was an amazing time to be graduating with technology skills. CSC was recruiting on campus and I met with some of the team including Pam Wall a BC alum and the lead recruiter. I liked Pam and the team and was impressed with the training program they offered. In February of 2000 I accepted the offer from CSC.
Signing the CSC offer letter February 9th, 2000
As part of my acceptance, CSC gave me the option of starting any time between June and October. I jumped at the opportunity to delay my start date so I could enjoy the summer after graduation!
Leaving Crystal’s house for my first day at CSC on October 2nd, 2000
When I signed the offer in February and started in October the entire world had changed as the dot com bubble burst in May of 2000 and as a result my time at CSC was going to be short lived.
One of the primary reasons I joined CSC was they offered an intensive 8 week Associate Training Program (ATP) in eBusiness Technologies. The thinking here was to take a bunch of recent college grads from a diverse set of majors and train them to be technology consultants and programmers. A week after I started at CSC I headed to Downers Grove, IL to meet up with my fellow ATP classmates
CSC Associate Training Program – Downers Grove, ILCSC Associate Training Program – Boston Office
During the ATP we worked on projects and implemented systems using object oriented design, Java, Servlets, JSP, XML, HTML, and SQL. While the training program was very intense overall it was a great experience! I learned some great technologies that helped lay the foundation for my career! Unfortunately while I was on the training program CSC announced major layoffs as the entire technology industry suffered a major contraction in 2000.
Luckily I was not part of that first round but as an associate sitting on the bench with no inbound projects I could see the writing on the wall. I updated my resume and started a job search in early 2001 to find my next opportunity.
