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Pete Ceredig-Evans from Try With Mirra | #554

• Nathan Bush • Episode 554

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In today’s Checkout, CEO and Founder of Try With Mirra, Pete Ceredig-Evans, gives us a behind-the-scenes look at what fuels his ecommerce brain, from the books that shaped his leadership style to the £400 iPhone book accident that still haunts him.

In this episode, we cover:

  • The most expensive online shopping mistake you’ll hear this week
  • How Romy The Brand blends fashion and art, and why Pete’s obsessed
  • The one tool that powers TWM’s remote ops, design, and onboarding
  • The books that changed how he builds culture
  • The bold new move to launch the brand’s own customer-facing app

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Speaker 1:

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Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Checkout. We catch up with previous Add to Cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy.

Speaker 1:

Today's Checkout guest is Pete Keradig-Evans, founder and CEO of Try With Mirror, the Shopify app that's helping retailers offer try before you buy without blowing out margins. Think of it as the online version of just try it on and it's working. Brands like Silk Laundry, mr Zimmy and Bondo Boost are using Try With Mirror to increase conversion, lift average order value and remove that. What if it doesn't fit? Hesitation? In this checkout, pete shares the 400-pound mistake that he once made online, the tiny Tasmanian brand that's inspiring him right now and the collaboration tool that his team can't live without, plus the one leadership book that he's reread three times and why it's shaping the future of his fast-growing team.

Speaker 1:

Pete, welcome to the checkout. Thank you so much for joining us. We had a brilliant conversation on our main chat, where you talked us through how Tribe with Mirror is essentially changing the shopping experience that customers can expect, by being able to wardrobe a range of clothing and send back items that they might not need, but, at the same time, for retailers, lifting average order values and exposing them to new customers who can buy with confidence that they might not have normally got. This isn't a paid promotion at all, but I just wanted to sum up that proposition because you did such a great job of it on the main episode and I think it's a really interesting one for retailers. But we're not here to talk about Try With Mira. We're here to talk about you. I've got five quick questions for you, but we're not here to talk about Try With Mira. We're here to talk about you.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I've got five quick questions for you. Okay, we're going to get to know the real Pete.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1:

Number one what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?

Speaker 3:

Well, there's been a few. One of the most memorable ones was when I was sat at my dad's computer back in England and I think it was eBay or Amazon, maybe I can't remember and I wanted to just add an iPhone. This was like when they first came out to the car and I ended up just buying it. I must have just hit buy now, and then we realized I hadn't just, yeah, added it to car, but I'd actually bought the thing. But it was actually just a book for 400 pounds or something. I just bought a book about an iPhone and so, yeah, I suffered an almost fatal beating from my dad. No, he didn't really beat me. Did you read the book? No, well, we got the book and we got the money back. But, yeah, that was pretty bad.

Speaker 1:

I tell you what, even with clients at the moment, the amount of test orders that I've done, that I've accidentally gone all the way through to checkout, you know what I mean. When you're playing around with the sites and then with shop pay, you accidentally press that shop pay button. You're like, oh, a bottle of gin has just turned up at my door.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I know. I mean, I love it now, there's nothing great about going cool click, click done it's great. But back then not so good.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, book about iPhones isn't the sexiest thing to buy, not for 400 pounds.

Speaker 3:

Number two which retailer has most inspired you recently? There are lots of really great retailers that inspire me. There's also ones which don't inspire me. One that has inspired me a lot recently has actually been a beautiful brand based in tasmania called romita brand, the designer emma. She actually collaborates with artists and their prints and she kind of collaborates and brings the artists paintings and drawings and amazing designs and brings them into her designs and has them printed and they're stunning. So yeah, that's inspired me a lot that they look beautiful.

Speaker 1:

Amazing, shout out On the other end of the spectrum. Have you had any conversations with our large department stores around potentially revolutionising their online experience? With a little try at home magic, some large departments.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I've had a David Jones. I've had a couple of good conversations with them. You know they seem they're this massive business, obviously, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we had some really good conversations.

Speaker 3:

That's where it is at the moment, more than that well, that's good, that's promising.

Speaker 1:

I like hearing that yeah they were.

Speaker 3:

They were sounded really keen and they're like, yeah, this would be really good. They said it'll take a while and I was like, yeah, babe you know.

Speaker 1:

All right, just hang by the phone. Number three can you name a piece of tech that you or your business couldn't live without?

Speaker 3:

oh, I mean, we're a tech company, it's like all of it. We use miro, m-i-r-o a lot. We're all fully remote. Anyone who doesn't know miro? Imagine like a giant whiteboard in your office, but it's a digital one you can use for planning stuff. You can add kanban boards in there, you can collaborate and do brainstorming you. It's just a great tool. It's almost like a silent. You know those tools which you don't almost realize that you're using it or it just kind of exists in your life and but then you it's so valuable yeah, no, it's a bit like that.

Speaker 3:

We do lots of business strategy, lots of planning work, lots of even execution, you know, lots of data work. We pull data in from our database and have it hosted in there. So yeah, that's, that's up there. That's cool. And do you use it hosted in there? So yeah, that's up there.

Speaker 1:

That's cool, and do you use it like in meetings together, virtual meetings or do you use it almost like a place where anyone can go at any time and add thoughts and ideas?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, both. So in our business we have like a product engineering board. We have boards where we use for kind of conceptually looking at architecture. We have boards for doing user story mapping. We have sales and onboarding boards where our design will be building sales assets and we'll use prototyping. So if we're building a new part of the app, we'll kind of put the wireframes in there. Then we'll kind of comment on things and collaborate on things. We'll we'll do it like our marketing team will meet with a brand who are using our app and take them through example assets, digital assets that they can use for activating customers throughout the funnel, across meta, and that's inside Miro, you know. So, yeah, we use it for a whole host of things. I guess it really is awesome for keeping everyone aligned, keeping the work super transparent, being able to inspect the work and adapt it and make changes when needed very quickly and it saves everything.

Speaker 3:

So yeah, I mean maybe I could get a job selling mirrors.

Speaker 1:

Good tip Everyone needs a fallback. Yeah, Number four can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?

Speaker 3:

I read a lot, listen to a lot. So one book I've just read again for like the third time and I've just recommended it to another person. It's called the Four Stages of Psychological Safety Amazing book. It's actually all about innovation, okay, and high performing teams, but it starts with building psychological state safety those four stages are if you don't know them.

Speaker 3:

They are inclusion safety, so you feel actually included. And then learner safety you feel safe to learn. When you feel safe to contribute, it's the third step. And then you feel safe to challenge. And if you've got those four stages of psychological safety in your team and your business, then you're kind of on the right track and it's actually going to create for a much more innovative environment. So, yeah, that one I really recommend.

Speaker 1:

That's a really interesting one. I haven't read it and I haven't even heard of it. But especially in your journey as you continue to expand internationally, I could imagine that those four stages might start looking a little bit different for every country, depending on the culture.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, 100%, and it's just something that we always need to. We want a culture where people can feel safe to test ideas and be wrong. We feel safe to challenge someone, even if they're more senior or if they are a founder or you know feel safe to just do their best work, become an absolute master in their craft, and I think that's where the ultimately high performing teams and businesses come from, which is, you know, environments where people feel psychologically safe love it.

Speaker 3:

Great tip another one, uh, the gap and the gain. It's a book actually. It's a listen to it on Spotify. So again, it's actually another book about more introspective, being psychologically aware of when you're in the gap versus the gain. I won't say anything else. And a final one. I'm just reading a book now by Carl Martin on leadership, which is called the Cave, the Road, the Table and the Fire.

Speaker 1:

Okay, there's something about your books.

Speaker 3:

They all need like three or four like bits to them.

Speaker 1:

Maybe it's just the season, that's just the season. And of course we can't not recommend the Dummy's Guide to the iPhone 3.

Speaker 3:

Dummy's Guide to the iPhone 3.

Speaker 1:

It's still on my shelf.

Speaker 3:

I'm going to read it later.

Speaker 1:

Last one I've got for you, Pete. What is your biggest challenge today?

Speaker 3:

Great question. So one of the things we're doing at the moment is actually building a native mobile app. We have lots of shoppers using Try With Mirror and saying to us oh, loved it, shopped with this brand, loved it, never shopped with them before so good. And they kept saying what other brands do you work with? Because ultimately, that's where customers interact with Try With Mirror. It's always for a brand, so we've now just built a uber eats, but for fashion and beauty now it doesn't look anything like uber eats.

Speaker 3:

But why do you use uber eats?

Speaker 1:

because you want a drunk some food.

Speaker 3:

You're drunk. Yes, you want food, you want it fast. You want that, you know. You want a selection of things that you can choose and it's the experience. You want to be able to have this convenience fast thing. So, with the same principles, we want to be able to have this convenience fast thing. So, with the same principles, we want to create a cohort, the Try Over Mirror app, which is a cohort of hundreds of brands that offer this elevated online shopping experience that helps customers shop. So it'll be native, it'll be mobile and it's going to be a way for we've got the brands already up on there. They're all connected to the Shopify backend. It looks amazing. So we're just going through some alpha testing at the moment. Then we're going to be going into some beta testing.

Speaker 3:

So challenge today is just catching up with some engineers later on today and talking about next phase of testing and what we are and what we're not going to be including in that beta testing round, and then dealing with the board who are saying, hey, why isn't it out last week?

Speaker 1:

Why isn't it out last week, Pete? Why isn't it out? Good question.

Speaker 3:

I have to quickly come up with something.

Speaker 1:

Well, I better let you go, so you've got time to make up your excuses for the board. Pete, thank you so much for joining us on the Checkout.

Speaker 3:

Thank you so much for having me, bushy, can't wait to catch up soon.

Speaker 1:

How good's that? From 400-pound iPhone books to fashion apps inspired by Uber Eats, pete's clearly not afraid to try new things. Now, if you love this, don't miss our main episode, number 537, with Pete, where we go deep on how Try With Mirror is helping brands lift average order value, reduce returns friction and rewire the customer journey. And if you're keen for more behind-the the scenes insights, come join the Add to Cart community. It's where all the best e-commerce ideas get trialed and tested. The link is in the description of this episode. Till next time.