Leading open source ecommerce platform Shopware taps Mark Stanley as CPTO

New York (March 1, 2023) - Shopware, the leading global open source ecommerce platform provider, today announced the appointment of tech innovator Mark Stanley as Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO). With over 20 years of experience and a proven track record at top tech companies like Microsoft and Sony, Stanley will drive product development for Shopware more broadly, with an emphasis on increasing productivity and scalability across global markets. Stanley will report directly to co-founders and co-CEOs Stefan Hamann and Sebastian Hamann.

“Shopware shares my vision for the future of ecommerce, which will be powered by AI coupled with an emphasis on customer experience and personalization,” Stanley said. “To say I am encouraged by this next chapter would be an understatement, and I look forward to exploring new avenues to ensure that our product development efforts deliver on what our global clients need most.”

By way of background, Stanley led the engineering team for SingStar for Playstation 2 and Playstation 3, where his team was at the forefront of the music gaming genre. Under his leadership, the team generated over $1B in revenue and sold over 30M units. He also led the development of Project Morpheus which evolved into Playstation VR, one of the industry's strongest VR systems of the last decade.

During his tenure at Microsoft, Stanley led with an innovation-first mindset, building the HoloLens headset from an early stage until it was integrated into Microsoft Office 365 and Print 3D. With HoloLens, Stanley’s teams mastered AR gamification, creating an immersive, video game tutorial-esque sequence to simplify complex situations for users.

He most recently served as CTO at Education First, where he spearheaded the initiative to move the company’s existing on-premise product technology into a multi-cloud first, user-centric and data-powered stack. Under his leadership, Education First created faster and iterative deployments integrated with Learning Data, Analytics and AI/ML to power the next generation of tools.

“The present is an incredibly thrilling time for ecommerce, as we explore how AI, 3D modelling and the metaverse will transform our industry and our clients’ businesses,” said Sebastian Hamann. “Mark’s vision, combined with his penchant for authentic day-to-day hands-on leadership, makes him the perfect steward to help Shopware shape the future of ecommerce, uniting all aspects of product development.”

As technology and commerce continue to intersect, entertainment is being placed at the forefront for consumers. With Stanley at the helm of broader product development, Shopware will further build out its stack, tapping into data-infused insights and functionality like 3D models and rendering to refine their state-of-the-art offering and accelerate them into the future.