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Key Highlights:

• Face-to-face matters: Building trust in partnerships requires genuine human connection beyond email threads
• Creative community building: From basketball tournaments at NBA arenas to custom sneaker workshops, innovative events create lasting bonds
• Lean but mighty teams: Many massive e-commerce brands operate with surprisingly small, efficient teams always looking to optimize
• 350+ events annually: Gorgias’s commitment to in-person relationship building across the e-commerce ecosystem

The Interview

In this engaging conversation, Drew Giovannoli speaks with Michael Klonoff, a Senior Tech Partnerships Manager at Gorgias who brings a unique perspective to e-commerce partnerships. As a self-described “retired hypebeast,” Michael combines his passion for brands with strategic partnership building, traveling extensively to foster genuine relationships in the e-commerce community.

Q&A with Michael

Drew: Can you tell us about your role and what Gorgias does for e-commerce brands?

Michael: I’m a Senior Tech Partnerships Manager at Gorgias, which means I spend a lot of time working with our Shopify app ecosystem and tech partnerships. I got into e-commerce in an interesting way—I’m a retired hypebeast, so I love brands, and Gorgias was a great fit since we work with about 18,000 of the best brands on Shopify.

Gorgias is a conversational AI platform that powers all customer conversations—”Where’s my order?” frequently asked questions, pretty much from any channel that a brand receives inbound questions. We consolidate all those channels in one place and have integrations with tech partners to ensure all systems are talking to each other. This gives brands a much better picture of who their customers are and creates significant process efficiencies.

Drew: You mentioned you travel quite a bit. How many events are you attending?

Michael: I think I’ve done 15 or 16 flights this year to date. Gorgias as a whole does about 350 events per year, so I’m on the road on average every other week. Sometimes it could be more—the number of events could be three to seven in a week. It’s nice to be home in between once in a while!

Drew: What are these events like? Why are you on the road so much?

Michael: To build trust and rapport across a book of 20 partners with various-sized go-to-market teams in different geographic locations, you need face time. There are two layers: meeting with teams, enabling them, having them come to our offices, going to theirs, and understanding who the actual people are that you’re working with. At the end of the day, we might be working a deal together, and it’s hard to trust someone who should be viewed as an extension of your team if you just get dropped into an email thread.

We do events with merchants in all kinds of cities and event types to build community for e-commerce brand operators and founders. Whether we’re hosting a dinner at ShopTalk or designing custom sneakers in LA, people can talk to their peers. We get a good understanding of who shows up and who’s engaged. These interactions allow you to go beyond talking about the weather or just their brand—you’re talking to these people as people.

Drew: What’s been surprising about the e-commerce buyers and brands you’ve learned about at Gorgias?

Michael: One thing that was very interesting is that sometimes you hear about these huge, massive brands, but the teams running them are actually very lean, small, and efficient. They’re always looking for ways to optimize and asking, “What levers can I pull to increase sales?”

Drew: Can you share some examples of creative events you’ve been part of?

Michael: Like with Corso.com, one of our partners—super innovative. The partner manager, Emerson Hammer, comes up with some of the craziest, coolest event ideas. A couple he’s pulled off amazingly successfully: He brought out about 100 brands in Utah, rented out the Delta Center basketball court, had brands do five-on-fives with each other tournament style, and then the winners got seats to the Utah Jazz game that night. What an incredibly refreshing way to look at community building, partnerships, and engagement with brands.

He’s also one of the pioneers behind custom sneaker events as part of a series called Drip Trip. We’ve hosted it at the Nike House of Innovation in New York City on the top floor, and in Los Angeles at the Shoe Surgeon. If you know much about sneakers, the Shoe Surgeon was controversial—Nike sued him for making reimagined, cooler versions of existing sneakers.

It’s like you go in, no one has done this before, everybody’s on equal playing field, and you have genuine conversations while cutting out the little swoosh of your Nike shoe and stitching it on, talking about creative processes and getting different insights. At the end, you get something you made with your hands, and people think about it when they wear them out. It’s a very thoughtful, innovative exercise.

Drew: Final question—what’s your favorite product or brand you’ve discovered through your work at Gorgias?

Michael: This is a fun question! Going back to how much I fly—I was trying to find a better way to travel. I’ve had some very bad travel experiences that made me not want to bring anything with me, so I started looking for backpacks made for people who travel a lot.

I came across this brand on Gorgias called Solgaard (S-O-L-G-A-A-R-D). All their backpacks have hanging closets built in, so you can pack seven days worth of clothes, your laptop, and all kinds of extra stuff. It expands and contracts, it’s very slim, and nothing catches as you’re throwing it around. Super durable—I put that thing through the ringer.

I found them through Gorgias, and I literally go everywhere with that thing. It’s like me and my backpack against the world! They also implement some of the best e-commerce strategies on their site, whether it’s self-serve tracking or live chat right on their website.