Spring conference season kicked off with a bang this year as I trekked out to Las Vegas for Demandware’s annual user conference and a most delightful experience. I’ll wax poetic about Tim Gunn’s keynote and my delightful interactions with him later. What you want to know about, and what I need to talk about is Demandware’s ascendancy into a major player in the eCommerce space for companies large and small.

More than 700 people attended the event at one of the newest hotels in the city – the Cosmopolitan. The content did not disappoint. CEO Tom Ebling’s keynote focused on four key themes, which represent Demandware’s key value proposition for its customers.

Global Expansion: Helping retailers speed time to market and facilitate efficient centralized management of digital commerce around the world

Omni-Channel Operations: Creating and supporting a single view of the customer, inventory, content and transactions for a seamless experience across all physical and virtual touch points.

Scale for Growth: Driving and sustaining growth of clients’ digital commerce sales, scaling key technical and operational dimensions

Merchant Empowerment: Providing efficient, intuitive, and comprehensive control of the site experience and operations to drive sales conversions and reduce cart abandonment.

While Demandware has the features to support many of these objectives, it also has a surprisingly broad partner base to help its clients, and a strong set of API’s (for the non-technical among us, that’s like providing connectors to plug different pieces and parts together into a larger whole). I must say I was impressed on that front as well.

Demandware went public a year ago, the company is a new RSR client and long-time friend Rob Garf joined their team a year ago… but still I really had no idea how many happy clients the company has.

I sat in on a series of financial and tech analyst briefings where we heard more about the company’s roadmap, and more from happy customers. Again, I was impressed. I see a three- horse race among independent ecommerce technology providers: hybris, Demandware, and Starmount. I’m not going to compare and contrast the three – I’m sure that information is available elsewhere. I will say this is going to be interesting. For me, the big question is much more about “who is going to create the first all-channel commerce engine? ” We all know that POS for specialty retail is going to morph and merge with ecommerce and mcommerce somewhere along the line – probably sooner rather than later.

Okay, now on to the good stuff… Tim Gunn.

Tim seems to be an unlikely presenter at a tech conference until one remembers:

• He’s a long time educator
• He is Fashion Dean for Fifth and Pacific, owner of remaining Liz Claiborne brands like Kate Spade, Juicy Couture and others (who are Demandware clients)
• He’s fabulous

While he didn’t quite present a PowerPoint (yay!) he did talk about the unfortunate state of brick and mortar retail and its fundamental resistance to change. He can’t understand it but likens it to the creation of the Oxford dictionary… where debates about unimportant things like “should contractions like don’t and won’t be included? ” held up the completion of the task for 20 years. Tim is this great mixture of old-fashioned ( “comfort in clothes is overrated “) and new age ( “I buy almost everything on line “) and he is oh so gracious.

I stopped by to introduce myself to him before the day’s events and congratulate him on parlaying his gig with Project Runway into a whole new career. He was so honest and candid, saying he had fully expected to spend the rest of his career in academia, when the former Liz Claiborne Corporation made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He took note of my name tag and said, “Thank you so much for stopping by Paula, ” giving me a warm handshake.

Later during his talk he made a few comments about the sorry state of fashion for petites and large sized women (amen, brother). When he took questions at the end I raised my hand and asked “Why do they think that large women will be fond of large prints and elastic waist pants? ” First he replied “I honestly don’t get it. It requires completely different designs to work with small or large frames. ” Then he peered through the lights and said “Paula, is that you? ” I replied that it was and we had a 1 minute mutual love fest. He was then kind enough to say something to the effect of “By the way, you’re making it work with your clothes, Paula “. I spent the rest of the day pretty much over the moon. I don’t get complimented on my clothes all that often. In fact, I have a friend who critiques almost everything I wear. Deena, maybe you’ve rubbed off on me at last!

So that was the start of conference season for me. It’s a pretty high bar, but I imagine I’ll continue to be surprised and pleased. Thanks for the invite, Demandware.