A.T. Cross Company

Patrick Maness

Heritage Brand Modernizer

Patrick Maness is the Senior Director of Global E-Commerce at A.T. Cross Company, the 180-year-old pen and accessories maker. With more than 20 years of experience in digital marketing and e-commerce, he has led growth initiatives across agency, distribution, retail and consumer brands.

Learning Through Every Career Move

After two different stints at direct marketing agencies, I spent 11 years at MLT Creative, a full-service B2B marketing agency, working on accounts most people never think about— wholesale automotive, poultry, building materials. At MLT, I worked as an extension of my client’s marketing departments, so I was able to see first-hand how corporate marketing collaborated with other functions within the company and participated in many of those internal, interdepartmental meetings. It provided context to what marketing’s role was within each of those organizations.

That experience carried me through five years building the corporate marketing function at TriMark USA, a foodservice equipment and supplies distributor that grew from $550 million to over $2 billion during my time there. From TriMark, I moved to a fully integrated seafood manufacturer and then to consumer marketing at a CrossFit-affiliated brand, then into e-commerce at a local fitness startup. Each stop taught me something different about scale, and A.T. Cross is where all of it came together.

A Platform Built for What I Could Manage

Cross is 180 years old, and when I arrived in January 2024, direct-to-consumer had been deprioritized for years in favor of B2B distribution and corporate gifting. The website was running on an unsupported Magento 2 instance, patched for years by a rotating cast of developers, so fixing one issue routinely broke another somewhere else.

I chose Shopify Plus to replace it for three reasons. I already knew the platform well, I could largely run it myself, and it cost much less than upgrading Magento.

“Before adopting any new technology, I ask three questions. Does it meet a real need, work within our systems and deliver a measurable return?”

“Done is better than perfect.” That was the operating principle. I launched the site knowing it lacked features that a 2024 e-commerce brand would typically expect, but it gave us a stable foundation to build on, and to be fair, it was better than what we had before. I didn't have an unlimited budget. Every dollar I asked for had to earn its return before I could ask for the next one, so the first year was a sequence of small wins that built trust with my CEO, finance, and with our private equity owner.

Growth That Outpaced the Systems Behind It

The new site delivered. Revenue grew almost 3x in the first year and 2.5x in the second. That pace exposed strain further down the chain. I had to look past revenue and check whether orders were flowing accurately from Shopify through to our warehouse management system, whether our staff had the capacity to pick, pack and ship at that volume and whether customer service could keep up with a customer base that had grown faster than the team supporting it.

Those are the parts of the job that don't show up in a sales report, and they've required as much attention as the storefront itself. We're building a customer data platform now to unify customer information, which will eventually support lower acquisition costs and a more personalized experience for our customers, but the immediate goal is to give the operations team the visibility to keep pace with growth.

Managing People as Individuals

My approach to managing people started with the philosophy of treating them the way I'd want to be treated. Over time, I learned that the assumption doesn't hold, because not everyone wants to be managed the way I do.

For example, I’ve had individuals on my team who consistently produced high-quality work and specifically didn’t want public praise for it. Recognizing that, and adjusting how I manage them, has taught me more than any general management philosophy could. That aside, I give people the outcome I need and the space to determine their own process, because that's usually where their actual skill shows up.

Testing Technology Before Trusting It

We implemented an AI-driven chatbot that functions as both a customer service agent and a sales tool, and it wasn’t perfect straight out of the box. You truly to have to look at AI agents as employees. You can't expect it to replace the function. You need to educate it, and that education is ongoing. We feed it new scenarios constantly, because every day brings a question we haven’t anticipated.

Agentic commerce is closer than most people think. “Before adopting any new technology, I ask three questions. Does it address something we genuinely need, will it actually work within our systems, and will it deliver a measurable return?” That filter keeps us from chasing tools that look impressive in a pitch but don't hold up operationally.

Some of the most useful information I get doesn't come from vendor demos or conference panels. It comes from comparing notes with peers at other brands who've already tested something and can tell me where it broke. I've learned as much from those conversations as from anything else. Staying curious about what's working elsewhere, rather than what's simply new, is the discipline I'd pass on to anyone building an e-commerce function from scratch. Of course, it’s also important to evaluate tools and strategies through the lens of what fits your organization and your brand.

The tools will keep changing. What decides whether they're worth adopting is still those same three questions— asked honestly every time.