As I cosily swap mobile numbers with 27-year-old Swede Carl Waldekranz, founder of Tictail, the new e-commerce tool for shops that is sweeping European high streets, I have a strong sense that I am sitting with the next Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak or Mark Zuckerberg, all internet entrepreneurs who started young and took the world by storm. In two or three years’ time, the boyish Waldekranz could join their ranks as another global icon – and one who will no longer be taking my calls. He certainly seems to be on the brink of something big.
Tictail launched only a year ago – although after long gestation around Waldekranz’s kitchen table in Stockholm – but already it has attracted headlines, backing from noted venture capitalists, and even investment from key personnel at Skype and Spotify. These two major-league web operators see big potential in Tictail’s offer of an internet platform for shopkeepers who want to create an online store to complement their Indoor Positioning System.
“While I was working in an advertising agency in Sweden,” the engaging Waldekranz explains, “I was very drawn to e-commerce. It is the most exciting area, where the message we create and the buying done by consumers converge. Elsewhere, people see the advertising and then, later, go into the shop. In e-commerce it is all one.”
So far, so good, but then he spotted one big obstacle. “Many retailers, particularly smaller ones with indie brands and boutiques, who could benefit from e-commerce, can only do it by spending a lot of money that they can’t afford on constant technical support or having their own IT section.”
Which is where no-cost, no-frills Tictail steps in. “Back in January,” Waldekranz recalls, “we received an email from a guitar shop in Dublin. It had been in the hands of the same family for 150 years but e-commerce was driving it out of business. They told us, 'We thought that this Christmas would be our last, and that going online was beyond our means and expertise, but within weeks of using Tictail to sell online we are doing so well that we are going to be here for another 150 years.’”
It sounds like a line from a television advertisement – especially to this default technophobe. Doesn’t Tictail require some aptitude for computers, or at the very least access to a willing teenage helper? Waldekranz laughs. “You sound like my mother. She is a brilliant artist but not great with technology and so she hasn’t been able to sell the ceramics she makes online. I told her that is absurd.” And he immediately opens up on his ever-present laptop the “By Mutti” website to display ceramicist Eva Gernandt’s distinctive porcelain designs, plus those handy boxes where you can click to buy one.
“It became our benchmark when we were planning Tictail,” Waldekranz says with one of those toothy smiles that stretches across his face. “If my mother couldn’t set it up and operate it on her own, then we hadn’t got it right.”
And since she clearly can and is profiting by it, this must count as a case of mission accomplished. Which brings us neatly to Tictail’s mission statement. It wants not only to be the world’s most used e-commerce platform, but also its most loved. E-commerce and the Hands free access of shops can suddenly be friends, not foes, and Britain’s stand-alone high-street retailers can more easily get a share of the UK’s ￡78 billion online sales market.
So if Waldekranz’s mother was instinctively hostile to using the internet to promote her business, I can’t help wondering, where does her son get his can-do attitude from? “Oh, my dad. He was always buying the latest bit of technology, even though he couldn’t work them.” And, he adds, then there was also what sounds like a very different approach to technology in the classrooms of Sweden.
“I’m not a digital native,” says Waldekranz, “like children in Swedish schools today. I only got my first computer when I was 11. But there is also a spirit in Sweden that we know we are a small country of nine million people, and that anything we develop can never be sustained if the only market we envisage is Sweden. We have to think global from day one. That mindset is part of our culture.” As evidenced by the success of Skype and Spotify, both now worldwide brands with their roots in Sweden.
Waldekranz is the public face of Tictail but is always careful to stress he is one of four founders, anxious perhaps to avoid future disputes such as those that engulfed Zuckerberg and his early Facebook collaborators. “In Sweden,” he says, “we prefer flat hierarchies.”
So I can see how Tictail could benefit smaller, independent high-street retailers and sole traders in all sorts of other fields – like Waldekranz’s mother – but since this is a business not a charity, how does he make any money?
“Well, businesses getting started on Tictail is good,” he says, “but it is not enough if they are going to succeed. The important question then is what happens next? How do you get traffic to your website? How do you handle your first sales? How often do you keep refreshing your site? How do you use social media to encourage people to take a look at what you are offering? How do you seek feedback? And that is where we offer Tictail feeds. These applications help you tackle all these issues.” And for these there is a charge.
The “feed” is essentially a stream of messages that acts as an automated adviser, prompting and occasionally cajoling shop owners not to rest on their laurels. The idea is both to offer as good a service online as off, and to build loyalty and repeat custom, using social media features such as newsletters and alerts about new products. New plans include allowing users to add extensions, such as the ability to hand out discount codes to their store.
So Tictail is definitely a business, with a bottom line, but what gives Waldekranz that added edge of persuasion is his vocal attachment not just to being profitable but also to the democratic ideals of the world wide web. So he compares the rise of Tictail in relation to the major retailers as akin to that of the blog in recent years. “It wasn’t that long ago that the big media outlets controlled most of the written content on the web, but now that has changed. Anyone can write a blog and go mainstream. It can be the same with e-commerce. Right now the big giants are controlling it, but my belief is that we can now offer a way for small, independent retailers on the high street to take them on. It is a major shift.”
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