From Writing Code To AI Today.

My relationship with the digital landscape didn't start yesterday. It started in 1998, writing code for GMAC Mortgage and then Intel. In my own time I was building online stores, sites like DiscountCyberMall.com and JustOnTV.com, learning how search engines worked by getting my own pages to rank, and selling on eBay in the marketplace's early years.

Fashion came next. In 2001 I launched iFashionMall.com, and in 2003 eModa® grew out of Europe Moda and Fusion, our retail stores in the Philadelphia area. eModa.com became the online brand and, in time, the company as a whole. By 2006 it had opened a third retail store, in Atlanta, and was running a 30,000-square-foot warehouse in Philadelphia. We also launched the eModa showroom in New York’s Fashion District, which thrived for more than two years representing some of the hottest denim brands coming out of the Los Angeles fashion scene. eModa ran until 2010.

I stayed in fashion through Sailor Jerry, the clothing brand built on the work of legendary tattoo artist Norman “Sailor Jerry” Collins. As General Manager and Global Web Manager I grew the brand: SEO and site optimization, a curated catalog, the distribution behind it, and a team working alongside the designers. When the company chose to focus on its spirits, I helped license the clothing line to a large distributor in California so the brand could keep growing in the right hands.

I learned early that survival in this unpredictable industry requires more than just a good design. It demands strategic foresight, relentless optimization, and an ability to adapt faster than the market changes.

That multifaceted background became the foundation for 1Digital® Agency, a team of designers, developers, strategists and marketers working on eCommerce design, custom development, SEO and PPC.

Retail never really left me. In 2014 my wife, Hanna, and I opened Waterfront Gourmet, a small café chain in Philadelphia that is still serving customers today. Hanna is from Bali, so the coffee had to be hers: we started Bali Espresso™ to import, brand and roast 100% Arabica beans grown in the Bali mountains, first for our own cafés and then for wholesale customers.

Today my passion and my pride is the business as a whole, and how it has evolved into AI and AI automation. That work is led by WorkspaceCMS.ai, and it started with a problem of our own. More and more businesses outside eCommerce were asking us for websites, and we were tired of how stale WordPress had become. So we built the platform we wanted for ourselves first. Then we realized it was the answer for our customers, our friends and family, and anyone else who wants a website. Now we are building AI into it so it gets smarter for everyone who grows with it, and we are working on a headless integration so eCommerce stores can use it too.