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Where to find Gavin Ballard:

Gavin Ballard - Twitter
Gavin Ballard - Website

Where to find Disco Labs:

Disco Labs - Website

Links Mentioned in Episode:

Disco Labs - Carbon Report

Shopify
Shopify BFCM - Black Friday Cyber Monday 2020
Stripe
Stripe Climate
Wildbit
DigitalOcean
Who Gives A Crap
Thankyou
Brooklinen
GCP - Google Cloud Platform
AWS - Amazon Web Services

Sponsor:

Shownotes:

Krissie Leyland  0:00

Hello, and welcome to the mindful commerce podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands, ecommerce service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. Today, we are talking to Gavin from disco labs who make things possible on Shopify plus through custom development. They're a team with deep platform knowledge and world class expertise on Shopify Plus, and have a list of happy clients. Gavin and his team have worked with brands like Who Gives a Crap, a sustainable toilet roll brand–who I've mentioned a few times within the community–and they've worked with big brands such as Harper Collins. So hi, Gavin, how are you? Would you like to add anything to your introduction?

Gavin Ballard  0:45

I'm very well, thank you. Happy to be here. Thank you, you nailed the introduction. That was a goodbreakdown of who we are and what we do. If listeners can't tell from the accent, we're based down here in Melbourne, Australia.

Krissie Leyland  0:59

Great. And so could you tell us a bit about what how you ended up in the Shopify space?

Gavin Ballard  1:06

Yeah, sure. My background is as a software engineer, so that's always been something that I've been quite interested in. Then quite a few years ago, I got involved in Shopify, just building a site out for a friend who who wanted to sell something online. That was nearly 10 years ago, I think, or maybe it is 10 years ago now. A few years later, after that, I was thrust into into freelancing. A couple of friends and I had moved overseas to start a company that didn't work out that well so I needed to pay the bills somehow, and just started freelancing in the Shopify arena. It just grew from there started out doing all of the standard stuff that you do on Shopify: theme builds design, setting up stores, etc... but because my background is in that software engineering, I eventually decided to focus on the apps & integration space, and we have sort of grown out the agency around that.

Krissie Leyland  2:01

Okay, so like, the apps integration space. So what do you do, there then? Like, what does that mean?

Gavin Ballard  2:09

Yeah, so what we tend to do is work with (these days they tend to be) larger merchants who are using Shopify and they have something they need to get done-whether it's connect Shopify to an external system, like a warehousing platform or something like that, or they want to offer their customers a new experience or something to improve the way that they sell things to those customers. (We work with them when) there's nothing off-the-shelf that does it-there's nothing in the Shopify app store, or their platform doesn't have an integration, or the merchant has these really funky, bespoke needs. So we step in there, and we work with a merchant to work out exactly what they need to get done to solve their problem, and then build the software to do that. We try to do that in a way that's really, because we're very much focused on Shopify and Shopify Plus, compatible with the platform and working with it rather than hacky workarounds or anything like that.

Krissie Leyland  3:13

Nice. So whatever your clients need, you can tweak things and make it custom to what they need, which is really good, obviously.

Gavin Ballard  3:23

Yeah and because we're just focused on the back end of the app, the thing is that we also work quite a lot with other agencies who are more focused on the front end of things (so design and theme development and things like that).

Krissie Leyland  3:39

That's cool,that's quite unique then, because I don't often see that people just focus on the back end, I guess. It's more popular as a Shopify agency to kind of niche into marketing or development. So yeah, that's cool.

Gavin Ballard  3:56

Yeah, it's a niche, but it is quite a large niche with the way that Shopify is growing at the moment. It's keeping us busy, so that's a good thing.

Krissie Leyland  4:07

Yeah, I can imagine a lot of partners coming to you. Like, "Can you do this super techie bit? I can't do it." So that's good. Rich, do you want to ask a question?

Rich Bunker  4:19

Well let me jump into the environmental footprint side of things... What do you believe is your role as an ecommerce service provider to improve the ecommerce world in terms of sustainability and social impact?

Gavin Ballard  4:34

I mean, I always am hesitant because I don't want to be seen to be preaching or anything like that... but ever since I started the business, I've always thought that the way that we actually do things is just as important as what we're doing. If you look at our company's mission statement, we have this dual purpose: One of which is to basically be the best in the world at building software for ecommerce merchants, but that's kind of our external mission. Then the internal one is to be building the company that we want to work for. I think that it would be really difficult today, in 2021, to say that you want to be working at a company that isn't being quite conscious of the the society we live in, the planet that we we live on and not be keeping that in mind so that we can do what we can to make that better. So that's why I say, that our role is being part of the society that we live in. We wouldn't exist without everyone else on the planet. I think it's just about being a good corporate citizen. That's my personal view and I think being public about that is meant for the people that we work with, internally at the company, to share that that goal, that value.

Rich Bunker  6:05

It's great and it's about being a good example, as well.

Gavin Ballard  6:10

Again, I am very conscious that I don't feel like my place, or our place in the company is to be preaching and making other people feel like, "Hey, this is what we're saying you should be doing" but I think it's more about leading by example, and trying to talk about it as much as possible.

Krissie Leyland  6:27

Yeah... Acknowledging it and building awareness around it. What do you think are the biggest issues in ecommerce when it comes to sustainability?

Gavin Ballard  6:40

Well, I think probably the thing that is on top of everyone's mind is climate change and carbon impact. Those two certainly have been a big part of where our focus has been in terms of our environmental footprint and what we think we can measure and improve quite significantly. Then, from a merchant perspective–given that a big part of your job as a merchant is often selling physical goods that need to be shipped across the world and that good itself is probably made of parts that have been shipped from everywhere else in the world–that's certainly a big factor when it comes to ecommerce: what that carbon impact is and how sustainable that is longer term.

Rich Bunker  7:36

How do you communicate that  message? Do you communicate that to your clients, when you sort of have initial meetings or do you just communicate it through your own community?

Gavin Ballard  7:51

We've started becoming a lot more public about this sort of stuff in the past year, I would say. Even though we're not a merchant that's shipping stuff around the globe, we do have an impact, like every business does. So, there was a decision made at the start of last year that we wanted to become a carbon-neutral business. Towards the end of last year, we we hit that goal. Part of our success criteria that we defined at the start of last year was that "We're going to do this, but we're also going to have a report about our carbon impact and give us a baseline to measure against in future years