Bret Sutherland

Many, many moons ago when flat file imports were seen as high tech, Bret stumbled into ecommerce, tasked with digitising a mail order catalog(ue). After quickly learning the hard way that pipe characters (“|”) are supreme and that dBase was neither a band name nor a sinful activity, he went on to become an ecommerce developer in the heady days of early eCom. After a fun decade with Viking Coders, whose USP was coding done by humans who cared—as evidenced by their proud proclamation that their customer support was better than an axe in the back of the head—the global financial crisis resulted in a pivot, from development into online retail. This too lasted a decade, replete with a deep dive into a veritable fruit salad of acronyms: EDI, API, PIM, SEO, GTIN, etc. With their background as ecommerce developers, they were a smart and nimble outfit, punching well above their weight in a largely antiquated vertical. Then he returned to Aotearoa and found a role at TheMarket that connected him to the NZ ecommerce industry. He’s now at the Winning Group, the popular and dynamic company behind the omni channel excellences of Appliances Online, Winnings, and Winning Services. He’s an avowed iMedia junkie. He also tried to write this bio with chatgpt but it was lousy. #humanity4eva