EP 284: Tarek Müller Builds a Global Retail Tech Solution

Many technology companies are built by people who create a solution for a nonexistent problem. SCAYLE was built by people who studied a problem and then lived it firsthand. For more than a decade, the team behind About You didn't just theorize about what enterprise ecommerce infrastructure should do—they built it, broke it, refined it, and scaled it inside their own business. They grew About You into a $3 billion online fashion retailer operating across 27 countries. By the time they launched SCAYLE as a standalone SaaS platform, they weren’t selling a solution they imagined; they were offering a real solution to a real problem. In this episode, Haley Boehning, CEO of Storyforge, sits down with Tarek Müller, co-founder of About You and SCAYLE, to explore what it means to know your customer, not from the outside looking in, but from understanding exactly where they stand. They discuss what it takes to build something that works at scale. How one earns trust in a new market. What Tarek learned that no one else could have taught him. And what it requires to take that hard-won knowledge into a new market, build credibility and land Levi's as their first major U.S. partnership as its global ecommerce platform across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Tarek candidly shares his insights about how to achieve visibility in the crowded American marketplace, and how to succeed by competing against ecommerce platform solutions optimized for commoditized search, not genuine discovery. This is a conversation about what happens when your story and your solution are the same thing.

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