From a technology perspective, our business has had three phases. The first phase was heavy technology, where we had a technology team building customized platforms, and leveraging third-party software that was knitted together in a very customized fashion. And that started in 2014.

Phase two, as Shopify developed more and more functionality and had the capability to handle where we wanted to go as a business, both from a growth perspective and multichannel, we felt like Shopify was a good place to use as the base platform and customize around it. In phase two, we had a smaller tech team. And that team implemented a heavily customized Shopify instance.

When COVID hit in 2020, we were forced to do a bunch of things. The first thing was, because of the product category we're in, luxury footwear, there wasn't a big demand in the U.S. for people to buy new pretty shoes to go nowhere. So our business suffered dramatically from a demand perspective. We were forced to cut costs everywhere.

We found ourselves in phase three, which was, ‘How do we simplify the business without doing additional customization?’ One of the big bull's eyes for us was a three to five-person tech team, so outsourcing became a very viable path. And that’s how we met Anatta.

We have said from the very beginning in working with the Anatta team that we wanted it not to feel like an agency relationship. That was really important to us. Since we didn't have Senior Technology Leadership in-house anymore, we needed Nirav and the rest of the team to be involved in, and be a part of, decision-making, strategy, direction—things like that.


I would say that we treat each other more like partners.

Anatta is someone that you can lean on to help—not just kind of do stuff, but diagnose issues and think about the future. Which is a different level of partnership than just the traditional outsourcing of engineering talent.


For us, Anatta offers valuable resources of experts who became part of our team pretty seamlessly.

We've been able to leverage different skill sets than we had in-house when it was purely a development team. We've been able to leverage strategic resources, research resources, and design resources.


The Anatta partnership model is like having a broader team.

M.Gemi has been in business since 2014. By the time the Anatta and M.Gemi partnership began, their dataset had gotten so large, that the demand on everything was just more than the system could handle. M.Gemi wasn’t able to get proper financials for returns or things like month-over-month, year-over-year… Everyone saw that the efforts and time would be better spent on fixing all of the back-end dependencies and removing those as necessary so that M.Gemi could achieve more efficient reporting and lower costs overall.

When you're pitched by an agency, you get to know them a little, and everything's good. And you don't really talk about what happens when it's not good. And whether it was a technical issue or something that hasn’t gone as planned along the way, I’ve felt very heard. I felt like the response was really quick in terms of making a change where necessary. And I think that's important. Because anyone could be good on a good day, but the team has been, especially at the senior leadership level, really responsive. They want us to be happy, they want it to work. And when they think we're not happy, they're not happy.


The Anatta team always wants to figure out how to make the partnership better.

In past lives, we would have gone out and done a lot of research. I'd be at conferences, I'd be talking to my peers and our peers at different companies and, you know, kind of heading down a direction and hoping it's right. Having experts who are working with different configurations and know what works, what doesn't, and understand what third-party software works best for our situation, rather than us, sort of guessing—that's been a big value for us.

There are so many agencies out there. And a lot of them are talented. But I think one of the big things comes down to: can you work well together? When things are good, great. But when they're not? How are you going to figure things out and come out of it? And I think we learned that about each other through very open and honest dialogue.