Alina Suedi Is Building Smarter Commerce Experiences and Brand Strategy

Alina Jo (Kahil) Suedi has an inside view of the e-commerce industry after spending a year working for the biggest music streaming platform. While there, she worked with well-established e-commerce brands and learned what worked and what didn’t in the digital market.  

“You watch how eight-figure brands actually operate: not the sanitised case studies, but the real infrastructure decisions that separate winners from also-rans,” Suedi says. 

Suedi also gained clarity about the system from her work experience, observing the upcoming platform developments before they’re made public and learning how product development and merchant needs intersect. She identified the gaps in the system and the type of technology that was needed to bridge them. 

Suedi left the e-commerce organization she was working for to build PUBLIK, which would be the type of agency she felt was missing in the e-commerce space. She asserts that most agencies claiming to have expertise in the platform she worked for misunderstand it. 

“Most agencies treat Shopify like a website builder. It’s not. It’s infrastructure. And if you don’t understand that distinction, you’re selling the wrong thing,” Suedi says.

She also joined the founding team at Linkable, a creator commerce app. For the last five years, Suedi has also been running Kollektif®, a DTC brand and design studio. 

From Brand Operator to Commerce Founder

While earning her MBA at Imperial College London, Suedi ran a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand and worked as a consultant to others. It was after she graduated that she joined Shopify to work directly with some of the platform’s biggest brands.  

“I saw their tech stacks, their retention playbooks, their conversion strategies,” Suedi says. 

Since Suedi has experience as both a platform insider and an active operator, she has insight that many other consultants don’t have. 

“Unless you’ve been inside both the platform and a live brand, there’s always going to be a gap. You’re either guessing about how Shopify thinks, or you’re guessing about how merchants actually operate. I’ve been in both rooms,” says Suedi

A Vital Learning Experience

Though Suedi only spent a year at the major e-commerce platform, she was there long enough to observe the patterns of the operation, which is something external partners may not see. 

“The brands winning at scale weren’t obsessing over checkout optimisation in isolation. They were building visual systems that worked everywhere: product pages, packaging, pop-ups, email. Shopify was the infrastructure. The brand was what people remembered,” Suedi says.

One observation she made was how the affiliate and influencer marketing was performed with very little operational cohesion. The DTC brands use influencer marketing because it is one of the fastest-growing channels, but they don’t have the proper infrastructure. 

Suedi has built her agency to address the broken creator commerce technology. 

Publik: Commerce as Public Space

PUBLIK is different from most other agencies. The look and the branding of the agency’s website resemble that of a modern art gallery, with a sophisticated appearance.  This was an intentional move to set it apart from SaaS landing pages. Suedi points out that commerce is a public space where consumers interact with brands through their digital devices. This gives them access wherever they go, from their morning commute to running errands. 

“We draw inspiration from public architecture: signage systems, wayfinding, municipal graphics,” Suedi says. “Theme marketplaces democratised design, but they also commoditised strategy. Every brand has access to the same tools now. The ones that win are the ones that understand brand as a system, not decoration.”

PUBLIK’s philosophy is reflected in how they build systems that work, whether a consumer is on a client’s site, a pop-up, or the client’s product is on an influencer’s Instagram post. 

The agency also features a newsletter community for e-commerce founders and operators called PUBLIK SPACE. The purpose is to help build community and share knowledge. 

“Everyone’s operating in the same fast-paced environment. Sharing what works makes all of us better,” Suedi says. 

What Most Agencies Misunderstand

Suedi has built her agency to avoid what she perceives as the mistakes of other agencies in the e-commerce landscape. 

“They sell themes. We sell decisions. Most brands over-engineer and underperform,” Suedi says.

The best stores, in Suedi’s opinion, don’t look like every other online store. Instead, they are built with the platform’s strengths in mind. She doesn’t believe that extensive customization is the solution to making a brand stand out. Instead, making thoughtful choices about which customizations add value while leveraging the platform’s existing capabilities may offer a better solution. 

“Every platform has constraints. Knowing which ones to respect and which ones to work around is the difference between a store that converts and one that just looks good in a portfolio,” Suedi says. 

Suedi doesn’t rely on buzzwords but explains clearly how PUBLIK can help its clientele. Understanding how an e-commerce platform works and offering solutions based on the business’s needs is more important than simply promoting features and using marketing language. 

A Differentiation Crisis

Artificial intelligence tools have made it easy to launch a brand, and though this may appear to be a good development, Suedi believes it has created a “differentiation crisis.” AI may be helpful with creating a brand, but it has also made it easier for all the brands to look alike.

The brands have access to the same tools, apps, and checkout flows, but Suedi believes the ones that will succeed are those that build a consistent, strong brand. 

Those are the ones that she believes will build long-term success, and Suedi built Publik for them.