Scott Eckert believes in e-commerce, taking over as Americas CEO at Mirakl in Boston

Boston Globe

6 hours ago

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Eckert joins at a time when Mirakl is expanding its e-commerce offerings, including software for sellers to upload their catalogs and coordinate the online venues where they sell their goods, new advertising options, as well as new software for business-to-business sellers.
Mirakl's Boston base can be traced back to a decision more than a decade ago by Mirakl executive
Kamal Kirpalani
to persuade co-chief executive
Adrien Nussenbaum
to make the Boston area its launchpad in the United States instead of New York. (Kirpalani, now chief revenue officer, has fond memories of attending
Boston University
as an undergrad.) Mirakl relocated its local corporate office from Somerville to 100 Summer St. in downtown Boston two years ago, and 108 of the company's roughly 800 employees are based there today.
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Eckert led
Rethink Robotics
before joining
Bain Capital Ventures
for a stint as an executive in residence in 2019, and then was hired by
Walmart
to oversee a portfolio of the retail giant's tech ventures. That work ended last year, and his former colleagues at Bain Capital Ventures suggested he check out Mirakl for his next act. (Bain Capital Ventures is among Mirakl's investors.) He found Mirakl's potential for growth, particularly in the United States, to be appealing.
'I was interested in getting into a Boston-based CEO position running an interesting business [and] this one was by far the most interesting,' Eckert said. 'I knew that this was the best technology in the industry.'
Fuel supplier fumes over MassDOT pick
Of the six bidders for the state's big service plaza redevelopment lease, only two are based in Massachusetts. And now one of those local bidders, Waltham-based fuel supplier
Global Partners
, is fuming: It was passed over in favor of
Applegreen
, an Irish company backed by private equity giant
Blackstone
, for the hefty 35-year contract to redo the state's 18 highway service plazas.
Last Wednesday, Massachusetts Department of Transportation board's capital planning committee recommended Applegreen's bid to the full MassDOT board for approval. Applegreen committed to invest $750 million in improvements, including full replacements of nine plaza buildings, and to pay the state an average of at least $28 million a year.
It didn't take long for Global and a nonprofit partner,
CommonWealth Kitchen
, to express their dismay. On Friday afternoon, Global issued a press release urging MassDOT's board to reconsider the Applegreen recommendation at a meeting this Wednesday.
Max Slifka
, Global's senior vice president of real estate, said in a statement that
Global would pay roughly 50 percent more in rent than Applegreen would. He added that state highway officials are missing an opportunity to invest in a business with 'deep Massachusetts roots' rather than handing off this important infrastructure 'to outsiders with no proven stake in our state.'
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Global already runs four service plazas that Applegreen would take over in 2027, at rest stops on Route 6 in Barnstable, Route 24 in Bridgewater, and Route 128 in Beverly. Most of the others are along the Mass. Pike, and run by
McDonald's
and Gulf. (McDonald's was not a bidder this time around, but Gulf owner
RaceTrac
was.)
A MassDOT spokeswoman said Applegreen was picked because of its demonstrated preparedness for the job and its track record of successful operations in other states. (Boston-based
Suffolk Construction
is Applegreen's general contractor on the bid.)
Jen Faigel
, chief executive of the CommonWealth Kitchen food-business incubator, said she saw the service plaza project as a way to broaden the nonprofit's work with Global. The two organizations had previously started discussing ways to get more locally made products into Global convenience stores, and then developed plans to sell some of the foods made by CommonWealth Kitchen businesses at the rest areas if Global were to win the bid.
'It was very surprising to me that a proposal like Global's didn't win,' Faigel said. 'For me, it just seemed like a missed opportunity, to not . . . support a business like this.'
BJ's gets bigger on its home turf
With a big presence in its home state of Massachusetts,
BJ's Wholesale Club
chief executive
Bob Eddy
has looked elsewhere for expansion in recent years. However, with the success of the
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Toward that end, BJ's announced it's building a store in Springfield, its first new club in Massachusetts in 13 years — as it opens stores at a clip of 10 to 15 a year. The pace is much faster lately, compared to the days in the mid-2010s when BJ's was only opening one or two a year, or none at all. The chain had 215 stores at the time of its 2018 initial public offering. That number is now up to 255.
The other Western Mass. stores include locations in Greenfield, Pittsfield, and Chicopee. Springfield, Eddy said, will open by the end of the year. About 100 to 150 people will work at the new store, typical for a BJ's (though a warehouse going up in Ohio will run almost entirely on robot labor).
'Once we started to turn the ship around from a new club perspective, . . . we started looking around the chain about where we wanted to put new locations [within our existing footprint],' Eddy said. 'We've already heard a lot from the community now that they know we're coming.'
BJ's is still smaller than its wholesale club rivals,
Costco
and
Walmart
-owned Sam's Club. But Eddy says his company offers lower prices than supermarkets while offering more variety than its two big club competitors — a recipe that has proven attractive to customers, new and old.
'It's causing us to try to accelerate even more,' Eddy said. 'People have been through a lot from an inflation perspective in the past couple of years [and] we're just a great destination when people want to save money.'
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A new tune comes to Logan
Add Logan Airport to Boston's long list of live-music venues this summer.
Yes, you heard that correctly: Professional musicians and college students will perform in the baggage claim areas of terminals B and C in July and August as a test run to see if it improves the experience of travelers stuck waiting for their luggage to roll out.
Massachusetts Port Authority
chief executive
Rich Davey
announced the initiative at a
Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce
meeting on Thursday.
'One of the top five customer complaints: 'It takes too much time to get my bags at baggage claim,'' Davey told the chamber crowd. 'The perception [is] our baggage claim is slow. How can we make sure we're keeping folks entertained or amused at baggage claim? We're going to start some live music and see if that works.'
The news prompted
Brendan Joyce
, public policy manager at
Lyft
, to pose a light-hearted question to Davey during the Q&A portion of the event.
'Rich, I have a very important question for you,' Joyce said. 'Are you performing live this summer at baggage claim, and if so, originals or covers?'
Davey didn't miss a beat: 'If we want customer satisfaction to improve, no, I will not be performing.'
Jon Chesto can be reached at