I Ran a 40-Person Commerce Team. This Platform Does It With Two.

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I Ran a 40-Person Commerce Team. This Platform Does It With Two.<br>The real cost of curated commerce, learned at Woo and solved at Sneak In Peace.

How To Influence A Generation<br>Jul 02, 2026

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Ecommerce is about to get rebuilt by video, and most of the people who built the last version of it have no idea how much cheaper the next one already is. I ran a forty-person commerce operation at Woo, ITV's Gen Z media brand. At the same time, on the other side of London, Dominic Jacob and Mark Bage were building Sneak In Peace, solving the exact problem that was bleeding Woo dry. I didn't know either of them then. If I had known Dominic Jacob while Woo was still running, Woo would still exist. I joined Sneak In Peace later, once I'd seen what the infrastructure could actually do. This is the story of what curated commerce cost to build by hand, and what changes once shoppable video becomes the entry point to something far bigger sitting underneath it.

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I pitched Woo into a very specific moment. It was post-Covid, developers were impossible to hire because every startup in London wanted the same small pool of engineers, and people had only just started speaking to each other in person again after two years behind a screen. The pitch spoke to that exact mental space, a generation relearning how to connect while also relearning how to buy. It was a cluster fuck of challenge and opportunity in equal measure, and we built into it anyway.<br>None of that touches the part that never makes it into a case study deck. To get 150 brands and 4,500 products live inside one marketplace, we had to build integrations with every retailer's own product feed, one at a time, because none of them spoke the same language and none of them were built to talk to each other. We built a finance stack from scratch to handle payouts, commission splits and reconciliation across 150 separate commercial agreements, each with its own rate, its own terms, its own approval chain, its own person who needed chasing on a Friday afternoon. And we built an account management function whose entire job was onboarding: getting brands live and keeping their stock feeds current. None of it was glamorous. All of it was the actual cost of curation, the plumbing nobody sees behind every "seamless" shopping experience a brand has ever put in a press release.<br>None of it was cheap either, and none of it was fast. The integrations alone took the better part of a year of engineering time before a single product page felt reliable. And even once it was built, we still couldn't answer the question that actually mattered: who was buying what, and what made them decide. Purchase data lived in 150 different systems that had no interest in talking to each other. Tracking a customer's actual journey meant pulling five dashboards into a spreadsheet by hand and guessing at the gaps in between. We had a marketplace. We didn't have a picture of the person shopping in it.<br>Forty people. To do what a content driven marketplace could now do with two.<br>Why It Didn't Work<br>We built a brand with real hype and real engagement, and the work itself held up: original enough to win awards for content, for brand and for social strategy from the most prestigious bodies in the industry, and covered by a press that loved us.<br>Woo ultimately didn't work commercially, and there were plenty of reasons why. Breaking even in 3 years was always going to be a tall task. But the biggest one was the cost of the people it took to keep the thing running while we were still figuring out conversion, still figuring out engagement, still fixing the tech infrastructure underneath all of it in real time. That's an expensive way to learn. Every month we spent tuning a broken feed or rebuilding a payment flow was a month of payroll that should have gone toward the content and the culture, the actual reason anyone was watching in the first place. The business never got to run at the speed the idea deserved, because too much of its runway was spent paying people to hold the plumbing together.<br>There was also the structural problem underneath all of it. We were trying to run a fast-moving startup inside a large corporation, and that was always going to be difficult. Decisions that would take a founder an afternoon took ITV weeks of sign-off. Budget that a standalone startup could redirect overnight had to move through a process built for a broadcaster, not a marketplace. None of that shows up in a case study either. It's just the tax on trying to move fast inside a structure built to move carefully.<br>Going from zero to forty people in six months meant we never got the culture right, either. By the time a team found its rhythm, three new people had joined, a process had changed, or...