speaker-0: The real difference is when you start playing an e-commerce in a professional way, every time you make a mistake is a cost that costs more than the solution for one year. So, or maybe on the other side, if you want to start doing things by your own, maybe now you think that maybe the front end something is simple to do now using Claude or whatever. But the final up on the other side, is a professional app.

speaker-1: Honest ECommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest ECommerce. Today I’m welcoming the show Angelo Coletta. Angelo is the CEO of Zakiki. Angelo, welcome to the show.

speaker-0: shout out for him.

speaker-1: absolutely. I’m excited to be here. so for those that are unfamiliar with Zukiki, what are the types of problems you’re helping solve for e commerce brands?

speaker-0: Yeah, we try to out-temp to provide any kind of experience in the front-end of manipulation and relationship with the product. So we can customize the product in 2D, 3D, or we can show it in AR, or maybe in a layer of AI visual experience. So we provide a front-end experience to go deeper inside the relation with the product. On the other side, we can solve a lot of problems. and a lot of costs for operation. So we help companies to cut costs of the operation, to speed the process, to save time in a certain way at the end of the game, to save money.

speaker-1: Absolutely. I I mean, I know that this is a problem that’s come up frequently for some of the brands that we work with. primarily we work in the Shopify ecosystem. are your products kind of plug and play for Shopify or do they work with multiple types of kind of CMSs? Yeah.

speaker-0: We are a plugin for Shopify for sure, so it’s simply plug and play. We have a plug and play solution with another 13 platform that we are API for all the others. And we have an MCP server for someone that will interact directly through an LLM model, for example.

speaker-1: Absolutely. How long have you been building Zikiki and solving these types of problems?

speaker-0: So now it’s seven years, so it’s a bit long time. We learned a lot during the journey and actually we have around 10,000 customers live worldwide in more than 400 different industries. So the product works well for small guy with simple needs and works well for big corporate with a complex layout. with multi-store, with multi-channel, with a lot of process inside it, they want to need in one only solution to be sure that will be consistency everywhere and a simple workflow to be managed.

speaker-1: If you were to kinda think about the Rolodex of customers that you have, what are the types of industries that find the most success utilizing your visual technologies?

speaker-0: First of all, there is an old industry, they call Web2Print, Sport Uniform, all these guys, they in a certain way, they print something on some stuff.

speaker-1: Yeah. Like a perfect example, my my business partner is a a beer league hockey player. So I know that they go through the worst experience ever to make these jerseys every year.

speaker-0: Exactly. And the other big word is apparel, furniture. There’s a lot of things to do there, from sofa to chair to any kind of apparel. There is a lot of needs in the back office of the industry, many times in the B2B channel, not all in the front end. Maybe they start generally to manage this kind of experience in the B2B channel and then they move to provide it. the front end and for sure the luxury brand. We have a lot of them, Valentino. I hope soon we can stop Sandra Perius or many others, Testaoni. In this case, what they need many times is to manage in the back office a 3D down, then providing the front-end experience to customize or to visualize it, and then to create with the eye layer some specific catalog of this whole store just for any customers, like a one-to-one store created just for you. starting from your body, your bio experience and what you want to visualize for the new collection, for example. So we can create automatically something special for you and then you can push maybe in your physical store or WhatsApp list or whatever.

speaker-1: That’s amazing. With the 2D and 3D customization stuff, sp specifically, you talked about kind of the apparel and and product builder layer of that. I’ve spoken to dozens of those brands over the past 10 years at the agency. I know that that is a a big sector of folks out there. So how does that particular piece of the product kind of compare? to the ecosystem as far as ease of ease of use, as far as how custom can I get with it, you know, and and and you know, investment as well. I know that everyone is price conscious these days. so could you speak to kind of how the your product kind of differentiates itself in the market as far as the kind of apparel building technology?

speaker-0: Yeah, okay. And first of all, there is a different layer of what you can do in terms of customization. So for example, if you have to make a stupid things like to put only a sentence, a photo, a t-shirt, probably you could be in 100 way with 100 products. But if you want to start doing, for example, you have two, three layers of technology. Something is engraving, something is embroidery, something is printing, for example. In this case, maybe you can do this only with five products in the world. So complexity inside simplicity is the powerful tool that you can find inside Zakiqa. You can use Zakiqa for small things, but you are sure that if your company is growing up, you can grow with the same solution. Or maybe if you are a big company, you have customers with thousands of… employees with maybe 30 different stores, 30 different B2B channels, maybe physical retail stores, and they need to manage this experience in different way, with different stage in any kind of the sales channel. In this case, Zakega, for example, is probably one of the solutions. In the world, actually, you can implement inside your company like a plug and play solution. You don’t need to create code for that. Maybe you need to have, for example, you want to use Zakeka as an MCP server. Maybe you want to offer to your customer an interface based on cloud for interact on your product you can do with Zakeka. So there is the small layer of what is simple that is simple to anyone. But the difference is that behind the simple things, there’s a lot of things that you can use during your journey. But if you have a professional need, Zankeke is a super powerful tool that enables you to make a lot of things without creating specific code for you. That means product stability, learning curve that becomes close to zero, and a lot of stuff that are… the best way to have a real internal cost that is moved to zero. Because you pay us as a company, but you have internal costs when you need to adopt a software solution. So we have one of the most plug and play solution, even if in a complex ecosystem, as in a big companies, you find. And so you cut a lot of cost of implementation.

speaker-1: Absolutely. And that’s something that I always like to stress to merchants and to brands. They always come and this is the conversations we have like around design and building new websites, things of of that nature, is they want to be custom, but then when you tell them the investment that comes along with being custom, they kind of take a step back. And it’s it’s also I think it’s a bad investment, right? The all the money that you you can spare, you need to invest in marketing. To drive sales and drive adoption and learn from your customer. Whereas, you know, I think that some people make capital investments wrong, especially early in in the business, investing in in more custom solutions than off-the-shelf solutions. And any of the real kind of hardcore business books will tell you rent before you buy, buy used before you buy new. And and and so with that in mind, with this kind of visual customizer product. I mean all of your products for example, but it’s these are solutions that exist that are extremely customizable, but it’s not custom. And you’re gonna find that on your PL as a way better investment.

speaker-0: that anytime you need to create any kind of code around the solution, you are creating future problems and future cost of maintenance. So, for example, we serve thousands of customers and we never write one line of code special for one of them, even if the name is HP or Valentino or Ubisoft. Everything is inside the Platon Mesa feature.

speaker-1: We own an app as well, obviously not the size of Zikiki, but I’m assuming though, when customers like HP or Nalgene come to you with a great idea, you go, Yeah, we’re gonna do that, but we’re gonna build it in a way that everybody can use that good idea.

speaker-0: That’s true, sure, it’s true. I think that it’s a point of view that, yeah, I can agree. I think that the real difference is when you start playing an e-commerce in a professional way, every time you make a mistake, it’s a cost that costs more than the solution for one year. So, or maybe on the other side, if you wanna start doing things by your own, maybe now you think that… maybe in the front end something is simple to do now using Claude or whatever. But the final output on the other side is a professional output. For example, we provide, I think at the end, 200 different files for any kind of equipment for printing, and all these things help merchants to have that the workflow from the customers to the final product works well. Imagine that generally in the company, only the mistakes of bad printing is around 2%, for example. And 2 % when you are a 10 million euro company, so the mid company, is 200 key. Or generally, have, for example, lot of algorithm done by ourselves. to help the control of output of the printing files that reduce generally this mistake close to zero. So if you are a 10 million company, for sure you have this percentage of mistake, you can cancel this mistake. Before starting thinking that you can make a better experience online or whatever, you are cancel this cost. Maybe you are spending 40k in this case, for example. But if you’re a small guy and you’re spending 30 euros. that’s exactly the vision that I have. Product is something that helps your company to save time costs and to prevent maintenance and auto maintenance costs. And this is the real difference between one solution to another. For example, all the front end of Zakeka is an API layer. You can create your own interface and you don’t need to, you know, I don’t need to do anything in the mechanics company. And you are sure that any, the on the platform will be there as a company. You will use whenever you want. This is freedom from your side, but this power too. If you start doing your own interface on a platform that is not done this way, every time I update my platform and we do this every 30 days, you have some problems in your interface. And we know hundreds of customers that emote to us because they have this problem, we know that.

speaker-1: Yeah. It’s so funny speaking to you about this because I’m seeing so many parallels between what we’re doing with our app company right now. So I’m sure you and I will talk about that offline. but a commonality I see between all the products that you offer is kind of this 3D model base layer per se, which I think is a a key component of it. So if I was a company and I came to you, I probably need that 3D file first, or is that something yet you can help me create? Yeah.

speaker-0: can help you to create first. Second, the 3D asset is something that you need for some kind of configuration, but you don’t need for other industries, so it depends. And what we have done, we have created an AI layer that works like a meta producer of 3D files. You need to work on that. There is a 3D artist network behind our platform that can help you to provide immediately. what you need. But this cost is another cost that every day is slowing down. And so probably three years ago, if you don’t have a 3D asset native, it could be an upfront cost big enough to tell you, have to think about that.

speaker-1: I yeah, I remember they were it was in the thousands a couple of years ago per product, per look. Yeah.

speaker-0: Actually, think even if you are not, know, if you don’t have 1 million products, this barrier is broken. The cost of 3D molding is slowing down every day, it’s, you know, $30, $50, sometimes $100, a very complex product. And I think that AI will help a lot in the future, not to substitute totally the 3D artist, but to provide you a base that works for 90 % you need only to make some fine-tuning activities to be sure about consistency.

speaker-1: I would lump a lot of furniture kind of into luxury product. There is cheap furniture, but if you’re gonna put like AR behind it, augmented reality and like show people it in their living room or whatever. Yeah. you know, making that investment so they can visualize it in in the space, like you that that one, that that rendering is useful in that AR part, but then also on the product page you can show them a 360 view of the product now. So like these things are useful all over the place. And so it’s not just to kind of to power like AR or you know, a different type of model would be like a hat for virtual try on. It’s like, well, once you have that file, you can use it in d a bunch of different ways. Yeah, sure.

speaker-0: I think now there’s a lot of AI changing something on this approach because for example, if you are not like a Armani or Valentino, maybe a famous brand that you need the layout to be really hyper-consistency. You can have set some small mistakes in the visualization. In this case, AI is helping the 2D world. to become 3D as a perception. Because I can create a try-on experience or maybe a video with you with a t-shirt without having a 3D asset. It’s not perfect, but for example, if you are selling merchandising for a soccer club, a baseball club, you can assign some small things in the video that are not perfect in terms of the logo. you know, stuff, but you can add a lot of emotion on your product page. So I think that these two layers of technology, two layers of AR, will work together for a bit. For some works where you need the exact dimension, the exact position, you need AR, as in the past. For other staff, just to have an idea how the sofa will be in my room, maybe an AI can make a better job. You have a photo on one side of your sofa, on the other side, the photo in your room, and you can arrange a good enough experience with that AI. So it depends on what you want to do exactly.

speaker-1: Absolutely.

speaker-0: I think that these two things will merge in the next five years.

speaker-1: Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven’t. We’re releasing interviews like this every week. So don’t miss out. Now back to the interview. Where do you see the products that you’re offering evolving and how AI will kind of make the speed of technology of all these things you can offer kind of it’s going to make it so rapid as far as how you can add more features and more functionality? So what are you guys, you know, looking into twenty twenty seven? Like what do you think is you guys are gonna launch? Yeah.

speaker-0: One of the most important things that we’re doing, we are actually an MCP server, but we launch at the end of November the conversational interface. So you will manage all the powerful tools inside Zakeke, in the backend and in frontend, at your choice, just chatting. So Zakeke will transform itself in a, like a, you know, similar to any chopped model that you use every day. You can ask what you want to configure in Backoffer, you have to charge products, you can do that. You can ask agent to do a lot of job configuration in backend for you, just providing them the clear rules using your voice. So the idea is that actually Zakeke has more than 2000 different features in the Backoffer. This is a super deep product. And sometimes it’s difficult for a user to understand how strong the product is because you have to navigate. We make a lot of jobs for guides, for visual explanation, but as you know, any one of us, it would be more comfortable to ask, hey, I want to do that. Can I do this? Yes or not? And please explain how to do this. And so this layer We became, in a couple of months, the first interface of Zakek. And it’s a super big change. We are an advantage on that because Zakek has done following the principle of Mac Alliance. So we actually have a software created using the principle that any layer is divided. Everything is a microservices. The front end is an API layer. We have public API for everything. So it’s very simple to transport this architecture is in an iNative conversational app because we have the 80 % of the API ready and we have actually 80 different microservices that has the capacity of agents inside. we have just to, we have traded. agents to use the knowledge that inside the microservices actually. So this jump, will be, and in terms of perception, the problem will change a lot.

speaker-1: At least for me, I love talking to Claude, or you know, whatever AI you’re using, but like I always go, This is my idea. How do we make it better? And you have that same conversation with the Zakiki’s agent. It’s like you you it’s gonna ask you about the business, about the product, about the customer, and it’s gonna go it’s just gonna i go, Well, you should be using all these products and this is how you should be using it on your product page. And it’s like, Do you want me to coach you through setting up all these other features? ‘Cause I you know, I feel like a lot of people coming to will come for like one or you know, a dozen of the elements that you’re offering, not realize there’s all these other capabilities out there.

speaker-0: My opinion is that now we are in the era of maybe, I don’t know if you remember, about 30 years ago when internet started, everyone, you could be able to create a website. Your cousin, your sister, your brother, now it’s the same with AI. Everyone is using AI for creating something. But as you know, AI actually is a probabilistic tool. So you have a problem. Probabilistic doesn’t mean deterministic, but production is deterministic. It’s not probabilistic because with probability you make a lot of problems for you, for your customers. So you can use AI inside your deterministic process. So you have a lot of things that you need to manage. How can you use AI in a process that is deterministic without creating problems? First. Second, how can replicate the same process many times without prompting? and so you need agents that need something. I can control the output, that’s why we need another agent. So at the end of the game, to create a pool of agents that works well together actually remains a capacity of a software team, not of a people that the day before was maybe another kind of job, makes something different. For sure. AI is cutting the entry level, so anyone can entry. And there’s a lot of tools that help you. But when you need to manage AI inside a company, you need to guarantee cybersecurity. You need to guarantee replication of the process, scalability of the process, interaction with the other process, control the process. A lot of things that I think they will remain. inside products. my idea is that professional AI will be used inside professional platforms. And in the next 12 months, we will see this big wave of creative player of AI coming back to the real job.

speaker-1: Yeah. Absolutely. if I’m listening to this episode and the product sounds interesting to me and I want to learn more about Zakiki, where should I go? What should I do?

speaker-0: First of all, let’s visit our website. Let’s read some of the paper. Let’s see some of the example that you can find on the blog. Just understand how deep our complex could be experienced and how simple it to start a project of configuration or visualization in a different way inside your company. And after that, you can start using the product, downloading it as a app. in the different stores like Shopify, or if you are a company, probably it’s better to spend 30 minutes to have a demo with one of my guys that can explain you better, that can help you immediately understand which kind of problem you can solve and how fast it could be and how much money you can save. Because many times, maybe you start thinking as a geek having an idea, but when you have a discussion, you understand that you can solve more problems. Maybe you are fixing your mind one, but you have another five, and you think that one is a big problem, but the other five, maybe you need to solve solutions somewhere else. And then you understand that you can solve all these problems together inside a planet.

speaker-1: Absolutely. we’ll make sure to link to Zakiki in the show notes. Angelo, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show today and sharing all those awesome insights. Yeah.

speaker-0: thanks a lot. Bye.