10 years strong: CEO Carlos Miragall on growth, retail innovation, and the next decade at Nextail

In this interview, Nextail Co-Founder and newly appointed CEO Carlos Miragall, reflects on the company’s 10-year journey, from its early days as a startup to becoming a trusted partner for fashion retailers worldwide. And as he takes the helm, Carlos shares his vision for Nextail’s future, his commitment to its people and mission, and the strategic growth he plans to drive as the company enters an exciting new chapter.

Nextail has reached a major milestone – 10 years in business. What’s been the key to the company’s longevity and success, especially when so few startups survive past the first few years?

Nextail’s DNA is based on an intimate knowledge of the fashion retail industry and the challenges that are unique to it.

My Nextail co-founder, Joaquín, is a visionary leader who spent many years solving operational problems for retailers and getting a strong sense for how to leverage the latest tech advances and best-of-breed tools for optimizing their merchandising.

This combination of vision, deep industry knowledge, and our relentless focus on staying at the forefront has, in my opinion, been the key to our longevity, and I’m looking forward to building on this for the next 10 years and beyond.

Thinking back to when Nextail was founded, how have the challenges of fashion retailers changed, and how do you see Nextail continuing to support them in overcoming new obstacles?

Fashion retail as an industry has had an eventful past decade to say the least – a combination of hype cycles and some adverse macro events: fast fashion, multi/omnichannel, the emergence of Amazon, and later Shein and Temu, the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, supply chain disruptions – you name it.

At the core, the retailers that have navigated this decade successfully are the ones who have remained sharply focused on offering a great consumer experience and had a good grip on their operations – two areas where Nextail is a prominent and essential element in the toolbox.

Carlos, you’ve recently stepped into the role of CEO at Nextail, but as Co-Founder and former COO/CFO, you’ve been with the company since the beginning. How has your perspective evolved over the last 10 years?

I’ve watched Nextail transform from our start as the classic two founders in a garage—well, kitchen, in our case—to becoming a trusted brand with a global footprint.

During this period, Nextail has operated at the intersection of data analytics, technology and design, and always with the same mission: to help retailers operate more efficiently, so that consumers get better experiences and the environment is harmed a little less.

Since you were last involved with day-to-day operations at Nextail, you’ve gone on to lead, advise and support several significant start-ups across a variety of industries. Any valuable takeaways that you’re bringing back with you?

Across all these experiences, one truth stands out: people are a company’s most invaluable asset. As CEO, my focus is on empowering our team to thrive—through an environment where they feel supported, challenged, and motivated to innovate. 

And, on the other side, it’s also true that customer companies in every industry are also made up of people. Understanding them and their problems and being able to support them, is what ultimately makes companies successful.

With a multi-million € investment on the horizon and your appointment as CEO, what is your vision for the next phase of growth at Nextail? Where do you see the company heading?

I want Nextail to be the go-to solution in the market for retailers that care about having efficient operations, offering a great consumer experience, and causing less harm to the environment. 

Internally, I want Nextail to be the best place for our talented team of scientists, engineers, designers and other roles to develop solutions that empower a massive industry and have a global impact. 

I would like to celebrate reaching the 100 customer milestone soon, and then start working towards partnering with our 1000th customer.

Nextail has always been at the forefront of AI-driven tech for merchandise planning and execution. How do you see the role of AI and automation evolving in the industry, and what role will Nextail play in driving that change?

Since ChatGPT was released to the public, AI tools and agents are becoming more and more ubiquitous. And their ease of use, through natural language prompt interfaces, is reducing barriers to the adoption of AI for many kinds of tasks and in different environments. Now everyone from engineers to students and even lawyers are using AI.

In fashion retail, we also expect many workflows will be supported by AI. But human decision-making will remain at the core because brand identities are defined by their artists and designers, and their unique ways of looking at the world.

In the same way, Nextail solutions can provide fashion retailers with the optimal answer to their merchandising problems as determined by state-of-the-art AI and ML algorithms, while leaving room for human teams to adjust and adapt the decisions as they see fit.

Ultimately, it is the winning combination of the human mind and AI – or “augmented human intelligence” – that will have the biggest impact on the retail industry – exactly what we’ve spent the last 10 years perfecting at Nextail.

How would you title this next chapter of the Nextail story?

I’d call it “Raising the bar”. That’s because we’re focused on building upon and maximizing the impact of what we’ve spent the last decade creating. It’s also because we’re setting a higher standard for what retailers should expect from their partners.

Our priority is refining our solutions to become even more intelligent, while also ensuring that they are accessible and intuitive. That way, our partners are even more eager to use them to improve their business decisions and operations, while fashion retailers that aren’t yet using state-of-the-art merchandising solutions feel more prepared and empowered to do so.

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