Pulse eCommerce Summit 2025

My key takeaways

There were so many great talks, but here are some thoughts from my favourite talks:

Tech Stacks for Hype Drops and Flash Sales

Luke Hodgson from Commerce Thinking led an insightful panel on Tech Stacks for Hype Drops and Flash Sales with leaders from Oh Polly, Nobody's Child and Seraphine.

Shaun Baker – CTO at Oh Polly reminded the room that peak seasons such as BFCM and hype drops also affect suppliers and fulfilment. Introducing balloting features brings more complexity with registration, communicating time slots and having the data to show which ballots have been the most effective. Shaun also stressed the importance of having failure alerts and an ironclad rollback process for when things go wrong.

Chris Bishop – Ecommerce & Digital Director at Nobody's Child spoke about the brand being famous for its high celebrity moments, which are often unplanned, such as Holly Willoughby wearing their product onscreen. There also needs to be a balance with driving innovation.

Tom Clements – Technology Director at Seraphine spoke about the key differences being intensity, going from 0-100 compared with a planned moment like BFCM. Sharing a story from his time at Palace Skateboards and a collaboration with Ralph Lauren when Ralph Lauren’s website was unavailable for three days, he went on to say that a non-negotiable should be to decouple systems as much as possible and not rely on legacy systems like an ERP that could grind everything to a halt.

Tom also spoke about the importance of keeping an eye on suppliers and payment providers, informing them of your intentions with these drops and turn off payment providers like IDEAL that can cause overselling in these moments due to the sales taking longer to complete.

The Future of Commerce: Emerging Trends, Technologies & the State of AI

Liam Quinn and Barrett Ahern from Vervaunt provided an overview of AI maturation, sharing results from a survey of Vervaunt’s customers (who are primarily in the premium fashion space) that showed only 1/3rd of their customers are doing anything with AI and it’s mostly limited to ChatGPT.

Liam and Barrett also shared examples of how brands are using AI; CurrentBody and Represent using tools like Airtable, Seraphine partnering with Emfas for content translation and H&M using human models for initial photos and then using GenAI to create different poses.

The impact of brand visibility/discoverability due to LLMs (Large Language models) has also been a hot topic, with focus on potential negative impact on SEO work. Attention is now turning to GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), with brands starting to track their presence and traffic directly from LLMs using tools like AthenaHQ.

Agentic AI (an autonomous agent that can perform tasks on its own, without needing constant human input) is likely to be the big thing over the next 12 months, bringing operational efficiencies in QA and UX testing, Competitor analysis and low level data entry.

Coupled with Agentic AI, Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a framework for AI Models to have contextual understanding of your data, including: products, customers and sales patterns. Shopify have released their MCP to interact with Shopify APIs.

To summarise, AI should be implemented from the top down in an organisation and having a strategic view at the leadership level will really help brands to stand out over those brands whose use of AI is limited to the people who are lower down in the organisation structure.

Growth, Leadership & Scaling Success in Modern-Day eCommerce

Bethan Rainford from Vervaunt was joined on stage by Morgan Fowles – CEO at TALA, Lawrence Montgomery – MD at Rough Trade, Emma Dawson – CEO at VIEVE and Holly Yates – MD at French Bedroom.

Morgan spoke about being a Customer-first brand and gave insight on her day-to-day schedule (which can be quite isolating as a CEO) of managing the board and the other investors who are not on the board. The importance of reviewing agreements with investors to be clear on what their approvals are, how many meetings they want to have and diarising reporting. On the subject of AI, Morgan said that TALA feels like a company that doesn’t need to be an early adopter.

Lawrence spoke about setting the right incentives and internal structure for retail. KPIs that are a focus: Stock turn, Margin (because Rough trade operates on razor thin margins) and cashflow – Rough Trade is a bootstrapped, high-growth business with sensible investors.

Emma spoke about operating in the very competitive Beauty space and finding a positioning that separated Vieve from others. Acquisition is the single biggest focus for the brand, followed by Customer retention, Loyalty and building a Community. Vieve shares customers with retailers like Space.NK to be mutually beneficial. Emma spoke about managing stakeholder priorities and working with their founder who didn’t want to be the CEO of the company and navigating that relationship between founder and CEO is critical to making the business work.

Holly spoke about the unsustainable pace of AI in the space that French Bedroom operates in and a reminder in the value of using Gen Z, that they are our future workforce – they are not lazy, they just work in a different way. Holly also spoke about the importance of self awareness, to stop wasting energy on things that aren’t true – even if your mind is telling you otherwise.

ThruDark

The highlight of the two days was Louis Tinsley's talk from ThruDark. Though I wasn't familiar with the brand beforehand, Louis immediately captured everyone's attention. He introduced himself as a man of few words—which resonated deeply with me — and proceeded to make each one count. His compelling presentation covered his military background, ThruDark's authentic brand identity (which has some exceptional photography & video content), and their powerful mantra: "Endeavour Through Adversity" — a message for everyone who faces hardship in their lives.

Later, I had the fortunate chance to sit next to Louis and express how much his talk meant to me.

Represent

Represent closed Day Two as the headline act, with CEO Paul Spencer and CDO Stefan Lewis sharing the brand's growth story. This was an incredibly insightful, honest and open retrospective of how the brand got to where it is right now and their aim to be a $1bn business.

Paul and Stefan spoke about building a brand with Family and having a Foundation of trust and safety where people can be brave is at the heart of what Represent is about. Paul also talked about the importance of honesty with business partners, how wholesale partners have been intrinsically linked with Represent’s growth and that EBITDA is not currently where they would like it to be but they are currently investing heavily in the brand and that will pay back in 3-4 years. Stefan spoke about how loyalty is playing a key part in their retention strategy with 390k of their 1.7m customer base currently signed up for the loyalty programme.

To close

Events like these provide such a great opportunity to meet and hear from people at all levels of a company, offering insight and perspectives that is so much more rewarding to hear in person than through a podcast or an article. What the Vervaunt team have created with this event is something that feels genuine and authentic. This was only my second year attending but I’m looking forward to 2026!

The event also gave me the chance to see comedian Maisie Adam on stage. I’ve loved seeing her on the A League of Their Own Road Trips, and enjoyed seeing her in person – even though I got a bit roasted as “Neil the Web Developer” and unfortunately being described as the next Elon Musk. Taking my chance to leave following Maisie’s set – I got heckled by comedian Zoe Lyons who shouted “Neil, where are you going? - you can’t leave, you’re the oldest person here!” 🤣