EP110 - Holiday 17 Hot Take with Rob Garf of Salesforce.com Rob Garf (@retailrobgarf), is the VP of Industry Strategy and insights at Salesforce Commerce Cloud.  His team has access to insights from all the Salesforce Commerce Cloud clients (formerly Demandware).  We have a broad ranging conversation about what he's seeing this holiday season and trends he expects for next year. You can read more about his teams insights here: Salesforce Reveals Black Friday Was the Busiest Digital Shopping Day of the Holiday Season Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 110 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on November 30th 2017. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at Razorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. New beta feature - Google Automated Transcription of the show Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 110 being recorded on Thursday November 30th 2017 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot & Rob: [0:40] Hey Jason and a welcome back Jason and Scott show listeners. Jason R series that is a hot take on holiday 17 continues here in episode 110 we're excited to have the first time to the show someone you and I've known both for a long time and I've been trying to get on the show and we finally made it work, Rob Garf rub is the VP of Industry strategy and insights at Salesforce Commerce Cloud welcome to the show Rob. [1:06] Thanks gentlemen it's great to be here I feel honored to be amongst digital Commerce loyalty I feel like I'm obliged to say first time long time. Jason: [1:17] Appreciate it you know one thing we always like to do on this show is give listeners a little bit of context about how you came into your your control, I'm in what what the scope of the current role is so I know, like ourselves I know you've been kicking around the industry for a little while can you you talk to us about your career matriculation and what you're doing at Salesforce today. Scot & Rob: [1:44] Yeah yeah absolutely literally retail is in my blood my father actually was at a supply chain a bunch of different retailers around the country when I was growing up and I didn't have any, prettiest aspirations of getting into retail but I did grow up working in his distribution centers and working in some stores at. Ricky work for in retailers that he worked for and really really cut my teeth in a genuine way in headquarters, right around 99 2004 Lids the specialty hat retailer, where I live Ecommerce and at the time we're doing some really fun things like buy online pickup store we had an endless aisle app we didn't know, really what we're doing and put it together you know I shoestring budget but it worked and it was a lot of fun, and tell you guys probably are the only ones on the show that will remember that we ran into world back almost 20 years ago of course they're long gone as a, e-commerce platform but anyways from there. Certainly continue to kick around was industry analysts at AMR research leaving retail practice moved to lead retail strategy to IBM when I was in fortunate to land at demandware. Which took me about 5 years in when we got Acquired and summer 2016 by Salesforce, what is known as the Commerce cloud my role it's really fun I get to kind of put all the hats on that I've worn over the last 20 25 years and I lead a team called Industries for insights and really. [3:22] In short it's it's our job to stay in the market, understand where the industry's going would you that primarily through research and then we turn that back over to the industry, our customers and we use that to better understand where we should bring our company products so it's been a lot of fun over last coming