Jenna Holcombe, Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer at Centra, sits down with Bryan Mahoney to unpack how a Stockholm digital agency turned its internal tooling into a software platform now used by more than 300 fashion brands. Jenna explains why Centra made the hard call to drop every vertical except fashion, how the platform pairs headless architecture with wholesale and D2C in one back end, and why Centra refuses to rebrand around AI hype.
Behind the Expert
Jenna Holcombe studied branding and design and started her career on the creative side, first at Gyro in Philadelphia and then at Dynamo in Montreal, where she spent five years from 2009 learning to build ecommerce sites at a moment when selling directly online was still new for most brands — designing brand identities, apps, and shoppable “digital flagship” stores for fashion, lifestyle, food, and culture-driven brands. After moving to Stockholm, she began freelancing as an art director for Piotr Zaleski, a former fashion-brand founder whose digital agency was building ecommerce sites for around thirty fashion brands on a platform he had built with engineer Frans Rosén. She joined in 2014, and within about eight months the team decided to turn that tooling into software as a service; Holcombe went with the startup side, and the company launched as Centra around 2016. For the first years of bootstrapping she was its only designer — covering product design, marketing, sales, investor decks, and copy — and today, as Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer, she leads the brand behind a platform used by more than 300 fashion brands, including H&M.
The Quick Hits
- Centra was built for fashion from day one: Piotr Zaleski was running a fashion brand, couldn’t find a platform that fit, and built his own — with DTC and wholesale connected in one back end, because that’s what fashion brands actually needed.
- For years the company still said yes to everyone — consumer electronics, homeware, lifestyle. Around 2019 it made the risky call to serve fashion only. Not everyone inside wanted to; Holcombe calls it the best thing they could have done.
- Focus compounds. Niching down sharpened targeting by brand size and location, freed the product team from building for outliers “who were never as happy on the platform,” and made it clearer what to build and why.
- “Headless” became a dirty word after a run of famously failed projects, and Centra nearly dropped it from its messaging. It kept the architecture anyway — but it’s headless and highly opinionated, shipping an OMS, a PIM, a wholesale showroom, and one inventory layer out of the box.
- The sweet spot sits between three bad options: a microservices framework you must build yourself, a web shop builder that makes you look like a template, and a monolithic enterprise system that traps you. Fashion brands want a digital flagship, “not a vending machine.”
- Centra has deliberately not rebranded as an AI platform. AI is already throughout the product, but it sits as a layer beneath the top-level positioning — being the number one platform for fashion brands — because people see through hype.
- Discovery is shifting under platforms as well as brands. A US brand recently found Centra through ChatGPT and put it on its shortlist — a new channel for a company with great clients but, in Holcombe’s words, a brand awareness problem.
From the agency floor to a fashion platform
Holcombe’s path into commerce started on the creative side. She studied branding and design and was hired at Dynamo in Montreal for her creative work in 2009 — a time when brands were only beginning to realize they could sell online, not just show a portfolio of products. Over five years there she learned to build ecommerce stores, design apps, and create brand identities for fashion, lifestyle, and culture-driven brands, always with an emphasis on making the site a brand world rather than a transaction.
After moving to Stockholm, she started freelancing as an art director for Piotr Zaleski, whose digital agency was building ecommerce sites and the tech behind them for around thirty fashion brands. Within about eight months, Zaleski decided to turn that tech into software as a service and split the business into startup and agency. Holcombe went with the startup, which launched as Centra around 2016 — and for the first bootstrapped years she was its only designer, doing product design, marketing, sales, and investor decks.
Built for fashion from day one
The platform’s origin explains its shape. Zaleski had been running a fashion brand himself, looked at the options for selling online, and decided to build his own with engineer Frans Rosén. Peers started asking to use it too. From the start it combined DTC and wholesale in one back end — which turned out to be exactly what fashion brands wanted.
But like most entrepreneurs, the founders didn’t say no to business. Centra sold to consumer electronics companies, homeware brands, and anyone else who wanted it. Then, around 2019, with Shopify increasingly chasing the same clients, the team made the call to focus on fashion alone.
The payoff came in both directions. Marketing could niche down not just to fashion, but to brand size and location. Product could build only for fashion brands, instead of for outliers who were never as happy on the platform anyway. Holcombe frames it as a constraint that makes creative work better — and a mindset shift for people who came from agency life, where the mantra is “sure, we can build that for you.”
Headless, but opinionated
Mahoney admits he tried and failed to build a headless platform between 2019 and 2022 — it proved too complex for brands to adopt. Holcombe has watched the term go in and out of fashion: the coolest thing in the 2015–2019 DTC era, then wrapped up in famously failed projects, to the point where Centra almost removed it from its communications. It kept the architecture because it believed in it.
Her theory for why Centra’s version stuck is that it’s headless and highly opinionated at the same time. The suite ships with what fashion brands need: DTC and wholesale connected in the back end, a digital wholesale Showroom that works as front end as a service, an OMS, a PIM, and a single inventory layer. Open APIs let brands swap any piece out, but they don’t have to build anything to get started.
A digital flagship, not a vending machine
The other half of the headless argument is brand expression. Centra’s customers are mostly medium to large fashion brands with creative teams and creative directors who have a vision — and the one thing they can’t accept is looking like a template. Many arrive through highly creative agency partners: a brand sees the Paul Smith site, wants something like it, and the agency builds it on Centra. Other partners offer faster, more templated builds that can get a smaller brand live in around six weeks.
Why Centra won’t rebrand as an AI company
Over the past year, Holcombe has watched tech companies rebrand overnight as the AI platform for something — new taglines, AI above the fold, promise first and build later. Centra hasn’t done it. That isn’t because it’s ignoring AI: the platform already includes AI features, including a newly launched AI content builder and built-in AI translations. It’s because AI belongs beneath the positioning, not on top of it.
The same lens shapes what gets built. The question isn’t how to keep pace with the giant commerce company that has to please everyone; it’s what fashion brands need. As a creative, Holcombe sees AI as an option rather than a replacement — useful for scaffolding, but a brand known for its tone of voice may opt out of AI-written product copy entirely. Sometimes, she notes, an AI tool takes you down a rabbit hole you could have avoided by doing it yourself.
Omnichannel wins and a new discovery channel
What excites Holcombe most is unglamorous: the operational things her brands get excited about. Eton, which started as a wholesale-only shirt brand, now runs displays in a large Swedish multi-brand store connected to Centra, so shoppers can customize a shirt down to the button and have it delivered home — even though the kiosk doesn’t stock it. Most brands, she says, couldn’t get that to work.
The flip side is awareness. Centra has a strong product and clients like H&M, yet it’s still unknown to plenty of brands Holcombe meets at industry dinners. AI is changing that: an American brand on a recent sales call had found Centra through ChatGPT and put it on its shortlist. With the company eyeing the US, getting found where buyers now do their research has become its own challenge.
Sound Bites
- “Saying no to business is difficult and scary, but we did it. And I think it’s the best thing we could have done, because now we can focus our marketing.”
- “The tighter you understand the problem, it makes it so much clearer what you should build and why, rather than just saying yes to everything — which we agency people tend to do.”
- “Headless is such a dirty word sometimes. It’s gone in and out of fashion.”
- “We’re not this microservices framework where you have to build everything and have your own huge tech department. It’s also not a web shop builder. And we’re not the monolith enterprise system where you’re kind of trapped.”
- “There’s no reason for us to put AI in the tagline or position as an AI company just for the hell of it. And I also think that people see through that as well.”
- “We’ve got a brand awareness problem, because we’ve got a great product and we’ve got huge clients. There’s no reason why we should be an unknown platform.”
The Chord take
Centra’s story is a case study in how focus and good foundations reinforce each other. The decision to serve only fashion wasn’t just a marketing choice — it let the product encode what fashion brands actually need, from DTC and wholesale in one back end to a single inventory layer and a ready-made wholesale showroom. That opinionated foundation is what made headless work where so many headless projects stalled: brands got the flexibility to look like themselves without first having to build everything underneath. The same discipline shows up in how Centra treats AI. It hasn’t rebranded around the hype, and it doesn’t pretend AI replaces a creative director’s judgment. Instead, AI sits beneath the positioning, as a layer that works because the structured foundation underneath — clean product data, connected channels, one source of truth for inventory — is already there. That’s the pattern we see across commerce: AI is only as useful as the context it can draw on, and only as on-brand as the humans deciding where to use it and where to opt out. There’s also a warning in Holcombe’s brand awareness problem. As discovery moves into ChatGPT and other AI assistants, platforms face the same shift their brands do. The companies that stay findable won’t be the loudest; they’ll be the ones with a clear, focused story and the substance to back it up.
Put it to work
- 1Write down who you won’t serve. If your product, roadmap, or messaging is shaped by customers who were “never as happy” on your platform, a narrower focus may sharpen everything from targeting to what you build next.
- 2Judge your stack against three failure modes: does it force you to build everything yourself, make you look like a template, or trap you in a slow-moving monolith? The right fit avoids all three.
- 3Before going headless, check how much comes ready out of the box. Flexibility on the front end pays off when the back end — orders, product data, inventory — is already connected rather than assembled from scratch.
- 4Decide where AI belongs in your positioning before the market decides for you. If it’s an enabler rather than your core promise, let it sit beneath your top-level message instead of rewriting the tagline.
- 5Map which parts of the customer experience must stay in your own voice and which can be AI-assisted. Let AI handle the scaffolding, and keep a human on the last mile where brand expression matters most.
- 6Ask new customers and prospects how they found you, and add “an AI assistant” as an option. If ChatGPT and other tools are shaping shortlists, make sure the story they find about you is clear and accurate.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Jenna Holcombe
Headless is such a dirty word. Saying no to business is difficult and scary, but we did it, and I think it's the best thing we could have done.
Bryan Mahoney
We took a year and a half and we spent millions of dollars, and we couldn't launch.
Jenna Holcombe
Maybe we promise it first and then we build it later. We've got a brand awareness problem, because we've got a great product and we've got huge clients. I mean, we have H&M. So who's to say why we succeeded and why it still works for us? But I do think it probably has something to do with...
Bryan Mahoney
Welcome back to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I have the chance to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce. I normally say behind today's iconic or next-to-be-iconic brands, but today's going to be a little bit different. Today is an episode that I have been looking forward to for a really long time. Joining me today is Jenna Holcombe, a name that I have known for a very long time — a name and a person that I was fortunate enough to work with years and years ago at Dynamo in Montreal. But today I find Jenna as co-founder and chief brand officer at Centra, the commerce platform built specifically for global fashion brands. Jenna, I've already told you this, but I am absolutely thrilled to have you here today.
Jenna Holcombe
I am so thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me, Bryan.
Bryan Mahoney
Speaking of here, we are not in the same room together. We are not in the same country, we are not on the same continent. We were for a short amount of time. But where are you now? Tell everyone where you live.
Jenna Holcombe
So now I'm in Stockholm, Sweden. I'm American, but I met you in Montreal, and then five years later I ended up moving to Stockholm. So it's the end of the day here and the beginning of the day for you.
Bryan Mahoney
Yes. Time zones still kind of blow my mind. But I appreciate you saving a bit of energy for us at the end of your day, and it's always a treat to chat with you. We sort of talked about the fact that we worked together what now feels like 15 or 20 years ago. I don't know if it's appropriate to say, but I'm so proud to have watched your career arc. I love reading your content on LinkedIn. I love reading what Centra is doing, the parade of brands that are signing up for the platform that you built. But before we get into Centra, you have just a really impressive background. Take a couple of minutes — for those who don't know you, how did you get to where you are today?
Jenna Holcombe
Okay, great question. And I think I should take it back further than I usually would, because I feel like you and your co-founder Alex from Dynamo had a lot to do with me finding ecommerce. I went to school for branding and design and basically did that for a couple of years. And then you had some faith in me and hired me at Dynamo. You had a business going where you were building websites. I knew nothing about designing websites, but I loved branding and design, and I was hired for the creative side of things. And I quickly learned how to build ecommerce websites from working with you guys. So I have you to thank for that.
Jenna Holcombe
And I actually dug up a little old story. This was in 2009, when I first started working with you, and DTC ecommerce was very young. It wasn't really a thing. Brands were just starting to figure out that they could not only have a portfolio website of their products online, but they could actually sell. And you were quickly trying to figure all that out for the brands that you knew and were working with. I think I had built one website at Dynamo so far, and it wasn't even responsive. For your listeners, this was also the time when people were starting to figure out how to use their iPhones and maybe shop or look at websites. Before that, you would look at a website on your phone and it would just be a shrunken JPEG, basically.
Jenna Holcombe
And I remember you taking me into a meeting room and being like, Jenna, there's this thing called responsive design. Let me explain to you how this works. It's so cool. And I remember you tried for like half an hour and I was like, I don't get it. And fast forward 20 years later, and I'm doing ecommerce for a living.
Bryan Mahoney
But you're fluent.
Jenna Holcombe
Yeah, very fluent. So I think in the five years I worked with you at Dynamo, I got really excited about building ecommerce stores. What we were doing was helping brands go online — being able to build shoppable websites, bringing their brand world online. So it wasn't transactional. You guys always had a big focus on the creative side of things and the user experience, and making it this digital flagship store with really solid tech behind it. And of course I'm not technical, but I grew to love it that way. At Dynamo we also designed branding for brands who were just starting out. We built apps together, so I got to design apps with you for mostly fashion and lifestyle, food, and very culture-driven types of brands. So it was just a huge playground and laboratory for this amazing D2C world. I think we were really a part of shaping that, because you guys were quite far ahead.
Jenna Holcombe
When I joined you, I remember you going off to all the conferences and absorbing this new world and being so excited about it, and I got to go along for the ride, basically. So that's kind of how I got into ecommerce. I don't know how far I should take this — how I went to Stockholm and ended up with these guys.
Bryan Mahoney
Well, I want to hear that chapter next, but I do need to correct a couple of things. You're being far too humble. You keep saying you, you, but it was we, we, we. There were a lot of people with us at Dynamo, yourself included, that were just super curious. And I think what's exciting about the era that we're building in now is, again, there isn't a playbook. We're figuring it out. I think we were a part of shaping something that has gone on to be a really exciting industry. We didn't know what we were doing, but we loved working with brands. And before you got to Dynamo, you worked on some incredible brands too that, again, were culture-driven and that are iconic.
Bryan Mahoney
I remember the work that you had done on Hendrick's and some of those campaigns, and being absolutely blown away. So you're a huge part of the shaping that we did early on. And you say you're not technical — I sort of giggle at that now. You were always really curious, and I think you had, and continue to have, this amazing talent for having brand and technology meet in a way that feels very natural, that doesn't feel technical. It's not responsive for the sake of being responsive. It's how do we deliver the right brand experience and the right surface to the customer so that they can get the product that they either have been looking for, or maybe didn't even know they needed yet, but they just have such a great experience that they end up going through it. So we did an awful lot of work in brand and in technology. You were a huge part of that. It was amazing to watch you make this transition from just brand to this more holistic toolkit. And then you made the move to Sweden.
Jenna Holcombe
Yes.
Bryan Mahoney
And you found yourself at Centra. What was that path like?
Jenna Holcombe
So I ended up moving to Sweden for love. But the big part of my life here is that right away, through friends, I met this person, Piotr Zaleski, who was running — not exactly the same type of company you were running with Dynamo, but it was a digital agency. They were building ecommerce websites. It was a bit of a startup incubator, and he needed an art director. So I started freelancing for him and we just got along really well.
Jenna Holcombe
I always say that I go really well with CEOs — people who have a lot of ideas and just want to build fast and be scrappy, but somehow make the ideas really come to life and look a little bit bigger than they are. That's something I think is very fun. And I had to do it at my first job at Gyro in Philadelphia, before you guys, and even at Dynamo. It's like, how do we make these brands feel alive online? Build something that feels like a brand world, not just a logo. And we were doing a lot of those things for different types of startups that he was working on. And he had 30 fashion brands at the time.
Jenna Holcombe
They had a platform running in the background. It wasn't software as a service, but this was 2014 at the time, so they were helping brands sell online, building the websites and building the tech behind it. And then within about eight months of me working there, he was like, we're going to turn this tech into a software as a service, and I want you — and there were a few other teammates — to come along and do this startup, and we'll split startup and agency. So I went startup side, and we ended up calling it Centra. That was around 2016 we launched. Now, again, I'm not super technical, but what they needed to do was make it a headless software as a service platform. My job was to basically be the only designer. So I had to do product design, I had to do marketing, I was in sales. I did everything I needed to do.
Bryan Mahoney
Wore a lot of hats.
Jenna Holcombe
It's a startup, so anything I could do to use whatever my skills are — basically design, art direction, strategy, and communication. Actually, that's another thing that I learned being scrappy at Dynamo. I had to write a lot and strategize, and I was writing content for websites and slogans and things, which is something I've always loved as well. And that came in really handy for investor decks and pitches and things like that. So I was very much a right-hand man, the creative side of the startup, for many years. The only designer for the first couple of years when we were bootstrapping. So that's kind of the story. There's more to it, but that's it in a nutshell.
Bryan Mahoney
Well, first, congratulations on all the success. It's not easy to get something off the ground, and the agency pivot to software company is hard. I think back even to the early 2000s — Basecamp, or the team at 37signals — they were kind of the poster children for moving from agency to we've got this software product. And I remember an awful lot of agency owners way back then; it sort of became like having an agency wasn't the thing you should do. We all need to have a software product. And there are very few, if we're honest, success stories of agencies that have been able to incubate a product and then have that become the thing that they're doing, and sort of exit out of the agency world, if you will.
Bryan Mahoney
I actually had someone on the podcast yesterday who made the jump from being within a brand to joining an agency. And I don't think one is necessarily better than the other, but I do think there's a cautionary tale in there for maybe younger agency owners, or folks that don't have as much experience, that think that being an agency is a smell and being a software company is like you've won the lottery. Running a business is hard no matter what. But the fact that you all were able to do it — and maybe ruthlessly focusing on fashion is one of the ingredients for success, being disciplined in that regard. So maybe let's tell the next chapter a little bit about Centra. I do want to come back to headless as well — I wrote a note, I'll try to remind myself. But Centra, you deliberately are focusing on fashion brands. Of course your technology could work for anyone who has a product to sell, but you decided to focus on fashion. So talk about some of the benefits of doing that, and also perhaps some of the struggles. Was it hard to say no to certain people who didn't fit into your ICP, or ideal customer profile?
Jenna Holcombe
Yeah. And this is one other part of the story that I left out, because it's further back. This Piotr Zaleski guy — look him up. Wonderful creative entrepreneur in Stockholm. The reason he had the agency was because he was originally running a fashion brand, and being this high-energy person, he was doing it for a couple of years, going all over the world. This is the early 2000s. And just like these other brands we were talking about before, he wanted to sell online. He looked at the options and he was like, I'm just going to build it myself.
Jenna Holcombe
And I should say he had Frans Rosén — I should give him credit, because he's the mastermind engineer, developer, white hat hacker guy. They built it together really quickly, cobbled something together. I don't know exactly how they did it, but it worked. And then his peers started being like, can I use that too? So he started selling it. So that's the story. It was always built for fashion from day one. And I could get into the technical stuff, but we're not just D2C, we're also wholesale. He wanted that off the bat, connected together in one back end. And that was exactly what fashion brands wanted.
Jenna Holcombe
So they were buying it from him, and that's where the agency came from. But like any entrepreneur or businessman — I should say they, they're business partners, Frans and Piotr — they were not closed off to other types of verticals or any kind of product. They did consumer electronics on the platform. They would sell it to basically anybody who wanted it. It was mostly lifestyle brands, homeware, and they branched out a lot. They didn't say no to business. And I think it was about 2019 or so — I can't remember exactly when — we made the decision to be like, we are going to take the risk and we're going to just focus on fashion.
Jenna Holcombe
It makes sense for the product, it makes sense for marketing. We're up against some really big players now. I can mention Shopify. In the early years, we didn't even consider them a competitor, because they were building a platform for entrepreneurs. That's not what we offered. But slowly, of course, they crept into going after similar clients to us. So I think it was a good decision, a hard decision. There were plenty of people who didn't want to do it or were really afraid of it. Saying no to business is difficult and scary, but we did it. And I think it's the best thing we could have done, because now we can focus our marketing. We can target exactly. Really niche down.
Jenna Holcombe
Not just fashion, but even the size of the brand, the location. It's so much easier to focus. So that's just been really good for the business, and the risk definitely paid off, I think. But which came first? It's like the chicken or the egg. The product is now more heavily influenced — we can focus on fashion. We can only build for them. We don't have to think about these outliers who were never as happy on the platform as the fashion brands anyway. So, good decision, I think.
Bryan Mahoney
I think it's a really good piece of advice for people to hear. It's not always easy to focus, especially when you're building something and you're like, well, this can solve the problem that I know everybody has. But the idea of being intentional there does help out with things like messaging. Who do you want to be when you grow up? We can really focus on this. And of course, if someone is knocking on your door and they are insisting on using the platform, you can say to them, okay, but here's what you need to know — which is very different than you showing up and saying, come on in, we're going to be perfect for you, and then having them discover that, wait a sec, we're not this and we're not that. So I really like that.
Jenna Holcombe
In a world where there are a lot of talented people here, we could build anything. So it's putting those boundaries. That's always good for creativity and building anything. The tighter, the more firm, the more concrete your understanding of the problem — I'm trying to say it makes it so much clearer what you should build and why, rather than just saying yes to everything, which we agency people tend to do. Right? You bill per hour, you bill per project. Sure, we can build that for you. That's the mantra of an agency. And you have to kind of switch your mentality. But I think it worked out great. And I love focusing on fashion. It's a fun industry to be in, fun people.
Bryan Mahoney
And it seems to be working. If my numbers and research are right, more than 300 brands have put their hands up and said, hey Centra, we would love to use your software to help power these channels.
Jenna Holcombe
Yep, exactly.
Bryan Mahoney
I would check the box of that being successful, certainly. The decision to make the solution headless I find fascinating. And I find it fascinating because I tried and failed to build a headless platform from 2019 to 2022. I really thought that's the direction we were going in as an industry. I wasn't as focused as you all were. I was focused on commerce broadly — lifestyle brands, absolutely. But I kept looking around and seeing the sea of sameness. If you weren't building something that was custom, everyone was using the same template. And I started to get disappointed by what I was seeing. Even though I've always skewed a little bit more on the technology side, I am a brand person at heart.
Bryan Mahoney
And I felt like brands were missing an opportunity to express themselves. I thought doing something that was headless or composable was the answer. I got it wrong. It ended up being too complex for our brands to be able to adopt, especially in that era when there was an awful lot of emphasis on we need to try to do a little bit more with a little bit less. But you all have made it stick, and I'm just curious about that arc — what you've seen, and why it has been the solution for the brands on your platform to be able to stand out and do things that are a little bit more custom.
Bryan Mahoney
And then, maybe for bonus points — somewhat ironically, or maybe tragically in my case — I feel like in the era of Gen AI, headless is absolutely perfect, because you don't need an army of engineers to maintain it. You can prompt an awful lot of these things with strong frameworks and have all of that flexibility without the cost of having a gigantic team to maintain it. So that's a pretty loaded one. There's a lot in there to unpack, but I just thought we could go there.
Jenna Holcombe
Very cool to hear your perspective. I hadn't thought of that. Your journey with the headless platform made me think there are a couple of ways you can take this. Headless is such a dirty word sometimes, I feel like. It's gone in and out of fashion, right? It was the coolest thing back in 2015 to 2019, the DTC era.
Bryan Mahoney
The first version of Glossier was headless before it was even coined a term. We just did it because we wanted the experience to be super fast and super on brand and highly customized. That stuff matters.
Jenna Holcombe
And now I'm over here in Europe, and I remember when it kind of had its little crash and headless became a bit of a dirty word, and we even almost started removing it from our communications. We didn't change our product, because we believed in it, but it was almost like it was just getting a bad name. And that's probably some negative marketing coming from the non-headless platforms. It was wrapped up in a couple of failed projects by other headless platforms — famously failed projects in the UK, these legends.
Bryan Mahoney
Oh yeah, there's a lot of them in North America too. We tried. We took a year and a half and we spent millions, and we couldn't launch.
Jenna Holcombe
Yep, exactly. So who's to say why we succeeded and why it still works for us? But I do think it probably has something to do with the fashion focus — what fashion brands want and need. We are headless, but Centra is a highly opinionated piece of software. It's a software suite, really. When we were building this platform from the beginning, it was like, what do fashion brands need? Well, they need DTC and wholesale, so let's have them both connected in the back end. We also have what's called the Showroom. It's kind of like a website, kind of like an app. It's front end as a service.
Jenna Holcombe
You turn it on in the back end, and all the product data and everything that you have working in DTC works with wholesale. Of course it's different logic, but you don't have to build a custom wholesale site. It's ready to go. It looks beautiful. That's one of the first projects I did in 2015 — build this showroom. So it's a digital showroom, basically. So we have that, we have an OMS, we have a PIM, and it's all connected with one inventory pool — one inventory layer, whatever you want to call it. So you kind of get that out of the box. And because of the open APIs and things like that, brands can trade out the OMS or PIM or whatever. If they want to use something else — if they're not going to use us for wholesale, just D2C — they can plug in whatever they want. But out of the box, you can get the suite that you need.
Jenna Holcombe
So headless is a part of it, because that's the way the product is built, but we actually have a lot more to offer. And we're actually trying to work on how we market that, because we think we do a good job, but it seems like people still don't understand what we offer. They hear headless and they think they know, right? They think maybe commercetools. So we're not a commercetools. We're not this microservices framework where you have to build everything and have your own huge tech department to make it work, and take a year of your time. It's also not a web shop builder, like we would think of Shopify, where you can just go to their site right now and start your store. It's not that simple. And we're also not the monolith enterprise kind of system where they just take care of you and build everything you need and you're kind of trapped in this slow-moving thing.
Jenna Holcombe
So we feel like we've hit the sweet spot. We built something that we know fashion brands need, and maybe that's why it's worked. And the other piece of that is, of course, the flexibility that you get with headless. The brands that we work with are pretty big brands, medium-sized to large. They want their own experience. Like you said, it can't look like a template. They have creative teams. It's not a vending machine to them. It's their digital flagship store, where they want people to come and feel inspired and be able to explore.
Jenna Holcombe
They've got creative directors who have a vision. And they often find us through really wonderful agencies who are highly creative, who work with us. That's how they think of the process. They go to an agency and see, oh, you built Paul Smith's website. We want a site like that. And then the agency is like, okay, well, we'll put you on Centra and we'll build it for you. And of course there are other agencies that don't do such custom things. There's one Centra agency called Ventanas 95, and they build fast. They have these templates, so you can get up and running in like six weeks with Centra, and it's more templated. So the smaller brands tend to go for that if they don't need as much customization from the beginning. But I think it's something to do with the way brands want to be perceived. They don't want it to be so transactional. They need a mix of both. So we offer that, basically.
Bryan Mahoney
It sounds like the Goldilocks story — you found that sweet spot. And for whatever it's worth, I think you're right. I'm obviously biased; I think I was early. But with the discipline that you showed by working with these fashion brands, those are the ones that benefit from that degree of customization without having to go and build everything themselves. And again, for whatever it's worth, I think the industry's coming back here. We're coalescing around this idea that we need more flexibility on the front end. You're right, I think headless received an awful lot of negative press.
Bryan Mahoney
And now there's something that's called hybrid, where you start with a template and then you bootstrap a whole bunch of JavaScript on top of it. And you probably would have been better off starting with headless instead of trying to shoehorn headless on top of something that is template-driven. So we will see. But maybe that's a good segue to talk about branding and messaging. You were able to stay the course because you and your co-founders had this really unique operator insight that a fashion brand operating across all of these channels needs a storefront, needs a presence that is flexible and reflects their brand, and they need all of the flexibility in the suite of products that you offer.
Bryan Mahoney
And you've been able to — I think this is one of your superpowers — find that messaging and that branding that actually doesn't allow anyone who's shopping for you to disqualify you. I want to get your opinion on this. In the era of — I don't know if you've heard of AI. Is it in Sweden? It's this thing. There's this other thing that people like to talk about that's called agentic. Are you feeling any pressure around branding or remessaging to say, we are an AI platform, we are an agentic platform? How do you think about continuing to stay ahead, but also continuing to stay disciplined? Because I think the discipline and focus is such a huge part of Centra's story and success to this point, where you can't always be chasing the shiny object. How do you continue to meet your customers where they are, through the lens of a storyteller, a copywriter, and a branding expert?
Jenna Holcombe
Ooh, okay. It's like a positioning question.
Bryan Mahoney
Yes.
Jenna Holcombe
I mean, we're having these conversations all the time, and I have gone back and forth. About a year ago, I guess, when the AI bubble started to get bigger — I don't know what we're calling it — you start to see tech companies that quickly rebrand to the AI platform for whatever, or put AI above the fold on their website. They suddenly change their tagline and everybody's the AI expert. And I understand that. It's like, maybe we promise it first and then we build it later, because I think that's what a lot of people were betting on. Maybe it worked for some of them, I don't know. We didn't do that. Still have not done that.
Jenna Holcombe
Not to say we're not using AI. We have plenty of AI already in our platform, and we've just launched this AI content builder studio thing, and everything is enabled with AI, because we're just a part of the world and that's where the world is going. So of course we're using it.
Bryan Mahoney
Of course. That's where the world is.
Jenna Holcombe
Yeah. We're not going to reposition as an AI fashion commerce platform, at least not anytime soon. I'm kind of just thinking out loud, but I'm not going to say AI is a trend, because it's here forever now. I just think it's a layer below our top-level positioning. What we want to do still is be the number one operating system or platform for fashion brands. And whether that's using AI or in whatever capacity, then of course that's what we're going to do. But there's no reason for us to put AI in the tagline or position as an AI company just for the hell of it. And I also think that people see through that as well.
Jenna Holcombe
But I was going to say, one fact of the technology is that because of the way Centra is built, we are very AI-ready. You already kind of said that. So it's not scary for us to be in this new AI era. We also want to be genuine and authentic and stay the course. I think fashion is the top pillar of our positioning, and AI can come underneath, and we're building a lot of cool stuff. But we're not going to be the AI company. At least not right now.
Bryan Mahoney
No. But I think that's really good advice. It's easy to chase the hype. It's very easy to create something that is beautiful, that promises more than what you need to promise. I find it extremely difficult to do the thing that seems really simple and authentic. And I think that is one of the hallmarks of your work. I see it all over Centra, and you can obviously see it with the brands that are following you and that are choosing to really put their businesses in your hands. You're not just operating one channel for them; you're enabling them to show up across multiple channels. And that's really important. So I think you're right. AI is here. It's a part of everything that we do. It's almost table stakes. So advertising that you're suddenly something that you're not feels somewhat disingenuous to the cause. And being able to build from the inside, from within an industry, with that operator perspective — I think that's obviously a huge part of your success.
Jenna Holcombe
You just said it better than me. Table stakes.
Bryan Mahoney
No, you just set me up.
Jenna Holcombe
It should be assumed that of course, if you're in tech right now, in this industry, you are using AI as much as you can. Of course your team is using it for everything. I know our developers have all these cool things going on — not only learning how to use it day to day in the business, but what can we build? What do fashion brands need? How can AI make their day-to-day lives better? But we want to make sure that it's always through the lens of what fashion brands need. Not let's build something cool just so we can keep up with this huge commerce corporation to our left who's building stuff really fast. They're building something for everyone, all the time. They need to please everyone. So that's the question we're trying to ask ourselves.
Bryan Mahoney
I think there's a real risk — I don't know if you're seeing the same thing. I said before that in this quest to get to market quickly, a lot of brands started with the same template. There was this copycat mentality. I used to call it the sea of sameness. When I think about the ability to create copy and imagery using AI, I'm starting to get worried about the exact same thing — that we all look the same, we all sound the same. And that's exactly a brand world that I don't ultimately want to live in. I'm curious how much that thinking goes into the product and the tooling that you're building, so that brands can still show up and be unique. Or maybe it's less of a product thing and more of a philosophical thing. Do you get an opportunity to advise?
Jenna Holcombe
At that point it comes back to what part of your site, or what part of the user experience, do you want to feel really on brand — in your voice, that stuff. For me as a creative, I know that AI still isn't replacing any of that. If you're a brand that's known for your specific tone of voice — because we have AI translations built into the product now — maybe you're not going to use that to write your product copy. You're going to opt out. But if it's not so important to you, then maybe you do use it.
Bryan Mahoney
Use 80% of it, and you do the last-mile piece where you're the creative director. You come in and say, okay, I'm going to put my stamp on this and my voice on this, but thank you for doing the scaffolding for me. You saved me a couple of hours and I got this to market faster.
Jenna Holcombe
I think that's what people expect now. They want the option. And that's how I feel as a creative. I want the option. I kind of know how to use some AI tools now in my process, and I know what works and what doesn't, and I know that brands think the same. Of course some are further ahead than others. But the brands we work with — you should see their offices. They're messy and creative, and they really believe in the craft, and they want to stand out, like you said. So AI can only do so much. I think it's supporting these brands in certain ways, but I don't personally advise.
Jenna Holcombe
I have conversations with people on the side all the time about this creative process, and a lot of people feel the same way. Sometimes you'll sit with your AI tool and it just takes you down a rabbit hole, and you're like, I could have just done it so much faster myself. And then sometimes you do get a good result. So you want to have the option, but we don't want to force people either.
Bryan Mahoney
It's an interesting time. And I do want to come back to the fact that a lot of the decisions you and the team have made have been rooted in conviction, and maybe are slightly contrarian, and likely the reason that you've been able to achieve the success that you've had. I know we're going to run out of time here, so maybe I'll just give you the floor for another minute or two. What are you really excited about for Centra for the back half of the year? Features that are coming out, or brands that are launching, or just the industry in general — what gives you hope?
Jenna Holcombe
Ooh, where do I take this one? I mean, we have a couple of fun brands launching, but I can't mention them yet.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay, stay tuned. Stay tuned to your LinkedIn.
Jenna Holcombe
I think what excites me — and it's boring stuff, too — is the little things that our brands are excited about. I don't know if you care at all about omnichannel and stuff like that. That's a hot topic right now. It's not AI; maybe it's not so sexy anymore, but it's fun to see what brands can do with that. It shouldn't be revolutionary, but for example, we have a brand called Eton, and they do cool shirts. They started out B2B wholesale — they only did wholesale — but now they have their website, and they can do things like this: someone can go into the local — what's it called? — the huge multi-brand store here in Sweden. You wouldn't know it. It's called Åhléns.
Jenna Holcombe
They have these beautiful displays connected to Centra, and because they have these small kiosks in these big multi-brand stores, if they don't have something in stock, a customer can still order a really customized shirt and get it delivered to their home from the store. So you go in and there's this beautiful display, and they can customize down to the button. People are being really creative. That's the kind of stuff my clients get excited about. Most brands could never have gotten that to work, but because they have Centra, they can. So basically a customer can go into these multi-brand stores and buy anything they want, even though it's not sitting there. Stuff like that I find exciting.
Jenna Holcombe
And for us, it's like, where are we going next? We're doing okay in the UK. We've got a couple of big brands there. We're looking at the US. And of course all of our brands are global, so they're selling in the US, but a lot of them are based in Europe, so lots of cool conversations there. I'm now going all over the place, but our marketing team is growing, and I'm learning a lot. Because I'm a creative, right? I'm more of a designer, a communicator, and a creative person, but I'm working more and more with marketing.
Jenna Holcombe
Okay, now I'm going to go brand side here. Something we've learned is that we've got a brand awareness problem, because we've got a great product and we've got huge clients. I mean, we have H&M. There's no reason why we should be an unknown platform. So we're trying to figure that out. And this is an AI question too for us. How do we make sure people hear about us? A new way is these AI agents or chat LLMs or whatever. People are doing all their research for platforms in AI now, using ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. I was just on a sales call last night with an American brand, and we're like, how did you find us? Because we hear a lot — we'll go to these big dinners where we know these brands and they don't know us. I'm like, how have you not heard of us? And they found us on ChatGPT, and we ended up on their shortlist, and we're like, cool. This is a new channel for us to get the word out, because we've got a great product and we've got a cool brand.
Jenna Holcombe
And one other thing about Centra is we still have that agency side, where we operate very closely with our brands, and especially with the big brands, it's very white glove. We have a really good relationship with our partners, so we have a lot to offer. But we have a big brand awareness problem. Even though we have a cool brand, because we're brand-driven and we look appealing to fashion brands, it's sad that people don't know about us. So it's fun that right now we're trying to build that awareness in a smart way and make sure the word gets out there, because the competition is fierce.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, the competition is fierce. And maybe I'll wrap this up here. This is where platform companies like mine, Chord, and yours, Centra, are in the same boat as an awful lot of our brands. The way that customers are doing discovery is fundamentally changing, and that's nerve-wracking. I think it still comes back to great brand values and truly authentic copy, and getting that right is hard. I think it does require focus and discipline, and that's why I'm rooting for you. I think you've demonstrated the ability to do that. And it's also not a case of whoever has the most money and the loudest voice is going to win. You've got to be clever, you've got to show up.
Bryan Mahoney
You have to understand what your customers are searching for — whether you're offering a data foundation and a context platform, whether you're offering the operating suite for fashion brands, or whether you are a brand trying to meet more customers. It's a really exciting time to be building in this space, but I think the principles are still the same. Show up the right way with great content and a really great story, be really focused, and they will reward you for that, I hope. But I guess we will see. This was super fun, Jenna. Thanks a ton. Rooting for you and the Centra team, and it's good to be able to tell your story a little bit. And I really mean it — I'm super proud of you.
Jenna Holcombe
And I'm proud of you. This was so nice chatting with you. Sorry, I'm talking over you. I want to thank you. I'm proud of you. I'm excited to see your journey. We should really stay in touch more. This was really fun. Thank you so much.
Bryan Mahoney
We will. Thanks again.