An Interview With Martita Mestey
Being a successful retailer is harder than most people think. Teams are always overloaded with numerous tasks and it’s near impossible to leave room for innovation. Without leading the way and building incentives around innovation, most companies find it hard to convince their team to invest in innovation.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Yehiel Atias.
Yehiel is an experienced entrepreneur with over 15 years of international business development experience. In his 3rd company, Hexa, Yehiel advises the world’s largest retailers and brands on how to extract value out of their synthetic data.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Since I was a kid, my dad taught me how to do business. Our family had a small shop in the market and I remember spending all of my vacations working there and learning how to do business. This notion of understanding people, their pains and needs was nothing but fascinating to me. A ‘bug’ that remains to this day.
When I started my career, the startup ecosystem in Israel wasn’t as developed as it is now, so after finishing my IDF service, as expected, I started to build my first company. It was everything I wanted in a job, as I got to work with very interesting and talented individuals around the globe and had the opportunity to thirst my curiosity and meet many new cultures. I was just 21 at the time.
9 years later, I founded Hexa, which was my third company and first startup.
After years in the making and over a year of hands-on experience, learning what a startup is and how it operates, I decided I am ready for a new adventure and joined two close friends of mine. Little did we know that we were about to go through one of the most challenging phases of our lives.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
When we started Hexa 6 years ago, we didn’t know anything about online shopping, 3D or AI. We just knew that we wanted to build a solution around the fact that it’s very hard to buy clothes online. Since we were nowhere near being domain experts, no one that we approached, customer or investor, thought we could solve this extremely complicated problem. To be honest, why should they?
Unfortunately, getting hundreds of no’s slows down our progress almost to a halt. Not quite what we imagined when we started the journey and not as exciting as those sexy articles about selling your startup.
After more than a year into our journey, with the little resources that we had, we managed to test out our 3D models inside a small Israeli eCommerce. The results were overwhelming with a 104% uplift in sales.
Amazing right? Not really!
This was one of the most frustrating days in my business life. After all of the effort we put into getting this far, we finally knew what we needed to do, but had no one to support us down the road.
Since all of the Israeli investors have already refused to invest we had just one option. After speaking with my wife and team, I sold my house to fund Hexa’s next phase.
6 months later, we had live projects with Walmart, H&M and IKEA and Hexa was reborn!
Are you working on any new exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
One of Hexa’s main goals is to help retailers and brands reduce their carbon footprint using the power of our platform, synthetic data and digital twins. Our latest partnership with Snap and Microsoft does exactly that. As of last week, you can go into the LA Lakers online store and digitally wear your favorite player’s jerseys, without ever leaving the comfort of your home. Such an experience increases shoppers’ confidence and eradicates pollutive inefficiencies associated with returns.. Due to its cost-saving and sustainable nature, we expect to see more retailers and brands adopt virtual try-on (VTO) technologies throughout 2022 and go beyond VTO.
Using synthetic data, you can now render photorealistic images and completely change the way we shoppers experience your online store, by hyper-personalizing your visual experience.
Since the usage of synthetic data is limited only to your imagination, It seems that real-life photoshoots will soon make way to their digital counterpart, reducing the need for pollutive and inefficient shooting days.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful, who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Throughout all the craziness I enforced on my surroundings by choosing this path, the one person that was always there for me, who supported me through some really crazy ideas, while doing it with her calming voice and always with a smile, was my wife. For that, I will always be grateful.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Our journey taught us that with a bit of grit and determination, you can overcome any challenge. But this is a long journey, and at times, a lonely one. In fact, when we started, the ecosystem in Tel Aviv was not as developed as it is today, so we had to do most of our journey by ourselves.
Remembering those lonely days and nights, I make sure to allocate enough time to share my experience with younger entrepreneurs, giving them the support and backing they need. It is amazing to see the impact of simply listening and relating to those entrepreneurs’ struggles.
Some of them
Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. The Pandemic has changed many aspects of all of our lives. One of them is the fact that so many of us have gotten used to shopping almost exclusively online. Can you share a few examples of different ideas that large retail outlets are implementing to adapt to the new realities created by the Pandemic?
The pandemic influenced technological acceleration in the retail space, but these advancements have been years in the making. For example, augmented reality (AR) evolved from stagnant 2D renderings to retailers implementing an immersive and dynamic 3D experience. As a matter of fact, Hexa is one of a select few companies providing services to retailers selling goods on Amazon.com. If a company wants to upload 3D assets to increase their product sales, the company can work with Hexa directly to make sure they get the highest quality 3D assets at scale. Leading retailers such as Amazon are embracing the importance of elevating a personalized 3D experience for consumers while standardizing the need for digital twins.
The supply chain crisis is another outgrowth of the pandemic. Can you share a few examples of what retailers are doing to pivot because of the bottlenecks caused by the supply chain crisis?
Recent supply chain issues forced retailers to be very efficient with their logistics which means that every day counts. But retailers simply cannot sell products without first shooting them and photo studios bottlenecks, caused by irregular shipping schedules, only deepens their problem.
The solution is a new notion called ‘pre commerce’. Selling products before you have them in stock.
But how can one sell products without visualizing them in their studio?
With the guidance of some of the world’s largest retailers, Hexa developed a workflow where it can process low resolution, low quality, buyers photos, into high fidelity 3D models and images.
By using the images that are taken to buy products from manufacturers, retailers can now use low-quality visual data, they can now save the visualization costs associated with a new product launch, lower their storage expenses and improve their inventory expenditure.
How do you think we should reimagine our supply chain to prevent this from happening again in the future?
As mentioned above, the key to unlocking value and resolving many supply chain issues is creating digital twins of your products, well before they are actually in stock.
Due to its flexible nature and for the first time, retailers’ and brands’ content strategy can impact their entire value chain.
In your opinion, will retail stores or malls continue to exist? How would you articulate the role of physical retail spaces at a time when online commerce platforms like Amazon Prime or Instacart can deliver the same day or the next day?
The short answer is yes. Physical locations will continue to be a part of our lives for the foreseeable future. Even when you look at China, which has just passed the 50% eCommerce mark (shoppers buy more online than offline) and is ahead of the western world, there is still a long way to go before offline is a thing of the past.
In general, as time passes, stores will become smaller and more experiential. The once large budgets that were allocated to fund large stores will soon be diverted into a more white-glove experience and to maintain the offline experience of categories that will remain hard to sell online.
The so-called “Retail Apocalypse” has been going on for about a decade. While many retailers are struggling, some retailers, like Lululemon, Kroger, and Costco are quite profitable. Can you share a few lessons that other retailers can learn from the success of profitable retailers?
It’s all about innovation and incentives.
In March 2019 I met Doug McMilion and his leadership team.
It took me time to fully understand why Walmart CEO, who manages over a million people, took the time to meet a CEO of an early-stage startup from Israel, with a team of 8.
Many leaders speak about the importance of being innovative in today’s ever-changing environment. Only a few actively promote innovation. The reason for that is quite simple — IT’S HARD!
Being a successful retailer is harder than most people think. Teams are always overloaded with numerous tasks and it’s near impossible to leave room for innovation. Without leading the way and building incentives around innovation, most companies find it hard to convince their team to invest in innovation.
Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise to retail companies and e-commerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?
There is no simple answer, unfortunately. Chinese eCommerce companies are very sophisticated these days and have inherent advantages across their value chain. But a new partnership between China’s 2nd largest retailer and Shopify may be the first step in the other direction. Through its partnership, while the demand for western goods and brands rises in the east, JD.com just became a gateway to China for thousands of curious merchants that sell on Shopify.
Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If there is one thing I learned throughout our journey is that the only thing I need to be optimizing for, is my own personal happiness. For me, power, money, or success can be byproducts of me being happy, not the main objective. If you dig deep into the reasons why we do things, you will most likely find that the reason is being happy.
It took us six years to build a happiness plan that compliments five core pillars: Fun, Feedback/recognition, Meaning/purpose, Learning/Development & Autonomy.
But not all pillars were born equal. While fun may be easier to achieve, its impact on our happiness levels is the shortest one, especially compared to meaning & purpose, which can generate a long period of happiness.
So if I could start a movement, it would be one that helps people optimize for happiness.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.
Yehiel Atias On The Supply Chain and The Future Of Retail was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.