A Classic Cuban Daiquiri & The Business Value of Composable Commerce
Issue No. 10 - June 9, 2023
In today’s issue we explore the history and delicious simplicity of the classic Daiquiri and dive into what composable commerce is all about, focusing on the question of what the business value truly is. I look forward to your comments and suggestions. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy!
This Week’s Cocktail: A classic Cuban Daiquiri
The poor old Daiquiri. A legendary, iconic cocktail that serves at the very bedrock of mixology, it still suffers from incongruous associations with Papa Hemingway’s hedonistic excess and the deformation of the drink during the disco era - with its artificial sour mix and frozen strawberries tossed into a blender, topped with whipped cream.
But a true Daiquiri is the picture of simplicity itself - just rum, sugar, and lime - and it is perfect for hot summer afternoons and evenings. It also happens to be a foundational cocktail in the evolution of mixology.
The Daiquiri has a long history dating back to 1896, when Jennings Stockton Cox Jr. mixed the first Daiquiri. In reality, the people of the Caribbean had been combining rum, lime and sugar for over two hundred years before Cox ran into a pinch. As the story goes, Cox - who ran John D. Rockefeller’s Spanish-American Iron Company in Daiquiri, Cuba - had some thirsty American engineers in town and only had a bottle of young white rum on hand from a nearby distillery. Fearing the visiting Americans would not find that very appealing, he quickly ran out and picked some fresh limes, added some sugar and poured it over shaved ice. Cox called the drink a “rum sour” for years. Only later, when the drink made it first to Santiago, the largest city in Southern Cuba, did the drink take on the name “Ron à la Daiquiri”.
When the drink made it to Havana, the bartenders there started riffing, creating the drink we know today - shaken, with white sugar, and served up. The Daiquiri rapidly gained popularity in the early 20th century, especially during the Prohibition era when Americans sought their bibulous refuge in Cuba's vibrant nightlife. It quickly became a favorite among locals and expatriates alike, and of course it's fame grew exponentially when Ernest Hemingway developed a fondness for the Daiquiri during his time in Cuba.
Hemingway frequented the Bar La Florida in Havana became a huge fan of the drink. La Florida was run by Constantino “Constante” Ribalaigua, and under his innovative leadership the bar became known as “the cathedral of the Daiquiri”. Ribalaigua’s most frequent and famous customer - Papa Hemmingway himself - loved them so much he would order two to-go as he headed home from the bar at the end of the night, instructing his taxi driver to drive slowly so he wouldn’t spill them. But doctors had told Hemmingway to cut back on sugar, so he asked Ribalaigua to modify the drink by upping the rum and cutting the sugar (makes sense to me!). Ribalaigua added a bit of grapefruit juice and maraschino liqueur, creating the “Papa Doble”, which today is referred to as a “Hemingway Daiquiri”. Funny thing is, it had at least as much sugar if not more than a classic Daiquiri.
One of the reasons the Daiquiri is considered a foundational, iconic cocktail is that it was in many ways the first “sour”. Everything that combines the basic formula of spirit, citrus, and sugar - from the Whiskey Sour, to the Pisco Sour, to the Mojito, to the Gimlet, to the Bee’s Knees - is essentially a descendant of the Daiquiri.
So make one one of these hot evenings and revel in the simplicity and history of this great drink.
¡Por tu salud!
Classic Cuban Daiquiri spec, serves one:
2 oz (60 ml) - White rum (aka: Blanco rum)
.5 oz (15 ml) - Fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon (5 ml) - White granulated sugar
Garnish: Lime wedge
The process:
Add the white sugar and lime juice into a cocktail shaker and combine until the sugar dissolves. Add the rum, then fill with ice. Shake until very well chilled, then strain into a chilled coupe cocktail glass and garnish.
Notes:
With this classic Daiquiri, the quality of the rum will shine through. Use a decent one. I used a Havana 3-yr here, which is of course impossible to find in the U.S.. Good, reasonably priced alternatives are: Plantation 3-stars White, Flor de Caña 4-yr White, or El Dorado White.
The .5 oz of lime juice is typically about half a lime if you want to look cool and wing it like Cox did way back when. Just make sure you have a ceiling fan and sweat rolling down your temples to complete the effect.
If you are using simple syrup, I recommend 3/4 oz (just a hair over 20 ml).
You may notice that often ingredients are listed spirit first and often in descending order of the ingredients proportion. This can be problematic. Many professional bartenders know that it is best to add the spirit last. The reason often has less to do with making the best drink and more to do with the distractions and interruptions that often impact those behind the bar. That can be true when you are mixing at home. And if you do get interrupted, it is often easier to know where you left off by tasting the mix before you have added the spirit. Plus, if you have to start over you are not tossing expensive spirits down the drain.
Bonus: Hemingway Daiquiri spec, serves one:
1.5 oz - White rum (aka: Blanco rum)
.5 oz - Luxardo maraschino liqueur
1 oz - Fresh grapefruit juice
.5 oz - Fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon - Simple syrup
Garnish: Lime wedge
The process:
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker, then add ice. Shake until very well chilled, then strain into a chilled coupe cocktail glass and garnish.
Analysis: The Business Value of a Composable Commerce Architecture
The term “composable commerce” is a relatively new term being bandied about in the e-commerce industry - as software providers and consultancies market their solutions and services - seeking to help businesses modernize their commerce stacks. The term is often credited to Mike Lowndes from Gartner Research, who began promoting it as a concept a number of years ago - adapting it from modern systems architecture principles. Mike was not wrong, it is an effective way to describe how commerce tech stacks are often put together in practice, but what is misleading is how the term is being marketed and talked about today as both a panacea and emerging trend.
In essence, “Composable Commerce” refers to the use of modular, interchangeable business components that can be easily configured and reconfigured to meet changing business needs or a business’ specific requirements. These components can be anything from payment systems and order management to search to customer service and marketing automation. With a composable commerce approach, businesses can freely choose the best solutions that fit their needs and then integrate these solutions seamlessly into their existing infrastructure.
While in concept this contrasts with the so-called ‘monolithic’, legacy e-commerce platforms - where all or much of the components are tightly interwoven and often deeply dependent on each other. Many customers were attracted to the simplicity of an offering that encompassed all their needs, only to find they did not accomplish that across all the critical areas that were important to them. Many have also simply outgrown those platforms or find the overhead to maintain them challenging today. Many of these platforms encouraged businesses to think in an all-or-nothing approach, which ended up limiting customizability, and hindering scalability.
But in reality, the concept of composability has been used for years now in commerce - it just typically required expensive, time-consuming integration or custom development projects to add third-party, best-of-breed solutions into these environments. Software was sold as frameworks and applications that lived on a server somewhere and integrating these applications in a scalable way often proved problematic and complex.
As things have evolved, the term is now being used to signal an easier, API-based approach to standard integrations that make it easier to mix and match best-of-breed solutions into the commerce stack in a modular way. But the risk is that vendors are washing over their solutions with marketing language and salespersonship, obfuscating the realities of implementing and running their ‘composable solutions’.
Are composable and MACH the same thing?
This is where much of the confusion and debate in the market arises today. Many would say yes, but I say no. As I said above, the concept of composability is not new in commerce. Many legacy commerce platforms out there - think ATG, Websphere Commerce, or hybris - have been customized extensively in a composable way for years now with many third-party applications having been integrated into these environments. And even SaaS solutions like Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Shopify offer a level of limited composability with their third-party application ecosystems. E-commerce agencies and consultancies also make a living in support of a lot of composable projects, and have done so for years.
MACH, on the other hand, is essentially a higher standard.
For the uninitiated, MACH stands for Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native software-as-a-service, and Headless. Much enterprise commerce and marketing software out on the market today is API-first, regardless of it being based itself on a microservices architecture. That would make it composable, but not MACH. The value in MACH is in working with a vendor that has little existing tech-debt, a modern tech stack of their own, and can drive their roadmap with speed, agility, and efficiency - and to be clear, I am not talking only about members of the MACH Alliance here.
Much of the value and benefit of a MACH solution will be hidden from their customers in the short term, and will only really play out over the long-term. An API is an API, and as long as it performs to the SLA no one should really care if it is from a legacy ‘monolithic’ application or a modern, microservices based one. This is true for software all over the market and in many of the biggest, most advanced businesses online (like Amazon), and it works fine. The challenge comes when the vendor needs to adapt and innovate - like today. Then MACH can matter.
What attracts developers and technology leaders to composable commerce, and why should the business care?
First, and perhaps most critically, is the benefit to improved scalability and performance. Composable commerce allows businesses to scale individual components of their commerce stack independently, improving performance and reducing costs. If your search or order management modules are facing increased demand, you can scale those up independently without having to also scale your product catalog or cart applications. Likewise, you do not need to pay for capacity you don’t need.
Secondly, and related, is reducing the challenges of “vendor lock-in”. With a composable commerce architecture, companies should no longer be locked into a specific set of features or capabilities from a vendor or two. I say “should”, since this is easy to theorize about and put on a powerpoint or in a whitepaper, and another thing to execute these kinds of transitions. The devil is in the details, and it will not necessarily be easy to freely choose the best components for their specific needs and requirements and mix and match them or swap them out to their liking - but it is better today than it was a few years ago and standardized integrations and integration tools are making this much easier. This also affords businesses the opportunity to develop bespoke parts of the stack and plug them in more easily as well, which is particularly valuable in markets like B2B or verticals where online services are increasingly embedded into products, since the business processes inside those businesses tend to present unique needs and business models evolve more quickly.
Composable commerce also offers the opportunity to improve the speed of innovation and ability for developers to leverage standardized tools to work more quickly. For all the reasons above, composable commerce promotes faster innovation. Businesses can much more easily trial, test and deploy new services, components or functionalities without disrupting their existing operations and do so in a way that is isolated from the rest of the stack and systems needed to drive the e-commerce experience and business. This enables a company to stay abreast and ahead of where they need to be in a rapidly evolving e-commerce landscape.
And lastly, technology leaders are drawn to these solutions as they can dramatically streamline the size of the teams and the skills they need to manage and develop the solutions for the business. Standardization of interfaces, separation of concerns, and ability to scale and isolate capabilities can have a dramatic impact on the overhead associated with running a commerce tech stack. That may not be important for all to optimize, but there are plenty of organizations out there supporting legacy application environments that are soaking up person-hours without much benefit to the business and sucking blood from the bottom-line.
OK, But what does the business REALLY get out of a composable commerce approach?
There are clear business benefits attached to the speed of innovation, reducing costs, and improved performance that can align the business with the technology benefits, but in an e-commerce setting, the business is much more likely to be focused on the ability to test, optimize and personalize the customer experience for their customers, in the ability to effectively manage that experience, and in the ability to differentiate .
Composable commerce offers businesses the opportunity to more swiftly adapt and evolve the customer experience - differentiating in ways that connect with their customers, support their unique business processes, and test-into and evolve the digital experiences they deliver. This is more important now than ever, but is hard to quantify since much of the benefit is ill-defined and somewhat theoretical.
But the reality today is that the ways consumers interact online is set to change rapidly in a whole host of ways in the very near future. Consumers are already becoming trained to have conversations with digital systems versus the hunt and peck of parametric, keyword, and browse based experiences as they interact with Chat GPT, Bard, or Bing. Consumers will come to expect conversational experiences quickly, responding to the more personalized and efficient nature of these tools. A composable - or ideally MACH - architecture that is easily integrated-to and incorporating-of these types of capabilities will be critical for successfully testing and implementing these types of experiences.
Channels that up to this point have been dormant or nascent may quickly become critical as well. Interactive TV has been a useless way to explore and shop. That may change rapidly with conversational commerce. And with Apple’s recent launch of Vision Pro we can see that augmented reality and spatial computing has the potential advance quickly over the next few years and offer consumers a more natural and immersive way to engage, discover, and buy - again and critically this becomes even more possible to see when backed with a conversational experience. And in-store we will see that digital and AI-backed experiences will become more and more prevalent - and these should leverage the e-commerce and digital investments of omnichannel businesses, not require a new stack.
This is where the API-first nature of composable, best-of breed solutions can really pay off. The testing, experimentation, and evolution of these experiences will be critical for businesses to keep pace and innovate. Composable commerce supports this rapid experimentation and iteration much more effectively than a legacy environment or one where you are beholden to the roadmap of a single platform provider. New features can be developed and launched quickly and efficiently, reducing the time-to-market, cost, and allowing businesses to react swiftly, learn fast, and iterate against changing market demands and customer expectations.
And this is where modern MACH-based solutions may prove to be key in the end. Vendors too will need to evolve quickly, integrate easily, and be easy to trial and test or they will not be able to keep up and will slow their customer down in the process.
Do I need to re-platform to go composable?
Bottomline, no. As I have said, many businesses are probably already composable to some degree, even if the term is new to them. Multiple best-of-breed solutions are integrated into their commerce tech stack already. But, that does not mean it is a pretty picture. There can be bottlenecks and roadblocks that are causing a majority of the issues. A batch process here, a set of manual tasks there. Analysis of these can pinpoint where to attack the problems to gain maximum benefit in terms of speed and agility, and may point to an incremental approach.
Fundamental challenges in the core commerce platform and supporting applications like CMS, PIM, OMS, and search may necessitate some meaningful changes and a swapping out of the technology being used, buy that can come at a price. If adding a composable best-of-breed solution can be the fix, then that is probably the best approach. And in that process work can be done to make the core platform API-enabled and thus move the composable ball down the field.
Those are not necessarily small projects and a fundamental re-platforming may be required - in which case using principles of composability and MACH when making those upgrades is critical to consider. And of course, holding off on fundamental replatforming can mean you are carrying tech-debt forward, weighing on the bottom-line and reducing the agility and flexibility that can come with a more modern stack.
And of course, with any technology change there are going to be changes in how your teams work or the skills needed to support it. At a minimum the interfaces and business process will change, and often organizations develop around the technology they use - even if that is spreadsheets. Those changes can lead to longer-term benefits, but can cause short-term pain and cost as the business and its people evolve or must be replaced. (Let's hope that is not the case, but let’s also be realistic.)
What is the business case of going all-in on composable or MACH?
Honestly, this is where things can get tricky. Perhaps obviously, any business-case is going to tie the benefit to either cost reduction or better business results from the investment - or ideally both. If you are needing to upgrade a specific feature or capability, it is straight-forward; what is the cost reduction (reducing software spend, tech support, or operations efficiency ) and what is the business lift from making that change. Make a guestimate based on the KPIs impacted, often guided by a vendors track-record with existing customers - and look for a 18-month payback or not.
But the broader benefits of a composable approach or wholesale program is going to be harder to quantify and predict. What is the value of business agility? How do you anticipate the business benefit of being able to test and experiment against some of the new experiences and expectations that may emerge? What are the implications to the business of not having that agility and ability to innovate?
And let’s be honest, most business cases are full of holes. They help to sell a project internally and then are typically never looked at again. I am not saying these are not important, but I think they are flawed. They are used to make decisions on trade-offs and options, not to invest in big bets. This approach is in many ways about a strategy - a strategy to innovate and differentiate. You need to be sure you are clear on what that is before you begin and then commit - and that is tied to a broader business strategy beyond just e-commerce or marketing. Having a modern commerce and marketing stack will be key to executing a differentiated strategy. It may even be existential - and that can’t be looked at through the lens of an eighteen month payback period.
The best approach is to look at this as a long-term strategic program, not a project
And while it may be tempting for many to want to go all-in, that may not actually be the best and most prudent approach for most. The risks, costs and challenges of a “big-bang” project put the initiative and strategy at risk. Far too many large-scale initiatives fall victim to scope creep, changing priorities, and challenges with stakeholder alignment or turn-over to be successful because they take too long.
The more effective approach is to look at this as a program, not a project. One that may play out over multiple years. Prioritize the business and CX pain-points and points of leverage and agility needed based on needs today and near-term innovations and focus there. Get incremental gains that build on each other and give the organization the confidence to move forward.
Today those opportunities are likely the front-end capabilities to drive channels and new ways of interacting with customers, or capabilities to actually deliver on an omnichannel experience. And once those pieces are in place it may then be the time to focus on the underlying commerce platform - and it will likely be faster and easier in the long run as well. So in many ways, this is the reverse of what had been the convention before, during the legacy, ‘monolithic’ era.
Vote for Pedro! I’m running for the Executive Board of the MACH Alliance!
If you are in the MACH Alliance and have a vote in the coming MACH Alliance elections, I would be honored to have your vote. You can find my priorities and the areas I am most focused on on the MACH Alliance Election site.
Voting opens on June 28th!
Join me and meet at these upcoming events:
MACH 2 - Amsterdam - June 13-14, 2023 - Talking composable commerce and composable cocktails in one of my favorite cities in the world. Plus you can count on finding me at Pulitzer’s Bar at least once while I am there.
CommerceNext E-Commerce Growth Show - NYC - June 20-21, 2023 - From Amsterdam to New Amsterdam, talking about digital commerce growth. I’ll be speaking about driving customer engagement across all channels through personalized SMS marketing.
Bloomreach Edge Summit - Napa Valley - August 24-25, 2023. Join us in beautiful Napa Valley, CA to explore the impact Generative-AI will have on digital commerce and marketing. Get educated, discover key use-cases, and have a POV on the impact on your business and clients. If you can’t make the physical event, join us for the digital livestream.
Thank you for reading Commerce, Cocktails, & Conversions, I do really appreciate it. Shoot me a message with your feedback, ideas, and thoughts - I truely appreciate them.
If you are looking for me online, you can find me here, here, and here.
Be well, be safe, and here is to good business!
Cheers! - Brian