Before Kevin Eichelberger spent his working days thinking about online shopping carts, he pushed the real ones through Buffalo snow. His first job was collecting grocery carts from a parking lot. The work offered a fairly direct education in effort: lower your head, lean forward, keep moving. The weather supplied its own performance review.
He grew up in Lancaster, outside Buffalo, in a family he described as blue collar. Work mattered. So did doing it properly. Those early habits would travel with him to Atlanta, then Charleston, and into a business whose customers needed people to finish a purchase rather than merely admire a website.
A grocery cart before a shopping cart
Entrepreneurship was not the original destination. Eichelberger imagined a corporate career, with banking among the opportunities he considered in college. The ladder was there in his plans. The economy had other arrangements.
He graduated from the University at Buffalo in December 2001, having studied business administration with a focus on management information systems. The combination ought to have made sense to employers. After the dot-com collapse, finding a foothold in technology proved difficult. In Atlanta, restaurant work and web development helped him get by.
Working around small-business owners gradually changed his ambitions. He began to see the appeal of having an idea and taking responsibility for what happened next. In 2004, he and his younger brother Jeff started Boozin’ Gear, an online retailer of beer- and liquor-branded clothing and accessories. He kept working while learning the business.
Here was an education with customers attached. Selling online meant encountering the tools, services, and pitches that promised to make selling online easier. Eichelberger saw room to do better. In April 2008, he founded Blue Acorn; later that year, he and his wife moved from Atlanta to Charleston.
The customer becomes the builder
The sequence helps explain the business he chose. He had been on the merchant’s side of the screen. Blue Acorn would work on the experience that stood between a person wanting something and a retailer making a sale.
By 2017, he could describe the agency’s job in two parts: redesign a shopping experience, or improve the one already running. One route involved a substantial rebuild. The other called for a succession of smaller changes. Both required understanding how a customer actually shopped.
That distinction gave clients a practical choice. A website can need a new foundation. It can also need someone to notice the awkward step that everyone inside the business has learned to tolerate. Familiarity is an efficient way of making an inconvenience disappear from the people who could fix it.
Eichelberger’s interest lay in the commercial consequences of those details. An attractive site still had to work. A visitor still had to find the product, understand it, and complete the transaction. A redesign was a means of improving that journey, with results to be examined afterward.
The tyranny of the tiny form
Consider the checkout form. In a 2017 discussion of mobile commerce, Eichelberger returned to a very ordinary sight: someone browsing on a phone, then reaching for a laptop to buy. The shopper was willing. The small screen and the fields awaiting two thumbs made completion cumbersome.
That observation moved the conversation away from merely counting mobile visitors. If people were arriving but postponing the purchase, the useful question was what happened between those two events. Switching devices introduced another chance for the retailer to lose the customer along the way.
Mobile wallets looked promising to him. Payment methods that reduced typing could remove an obvious obstacle, especially as those capabilities became available for mobile websites. The proposition was easy to understand: keep the customer moving while the intention to buy was still present.
Then he was pressed on the evidence. Had the improvement already been demonstrated? He acknowledged that the implementations were new and that the data was still needed. The hypothesis might prove correct. It might also fail. He wanted measurement to settle the matter.
It is a revealing moment in a business conversation. A confident recommendation can acquire a social life of its own; soon everyone is repeating it as a result. Eichelberger left room for the test. The customer would have the final vote, cast through what they actually did.
He also argued for better ways to hear customers before making design decisions: quantitative evidence, qualitative feedback, and tools that helped a team understand an experience. The person with the strongest opinion in the meeting could be useful. So could the quiet evidence of shoppers leaving.
“Everything we do is rooted in data and analytics”
Kevin Eichelberger, at the 2019 formation of Blue Acorn iCi
More room, then more moving parts
Meanwhile, building the agency created physical problems as well as digital ones. In September 2014, Blue Acorn announced plans for another 8,000 square feet of office space. It had moved into its 12,000-square-foot headquarters only three months earlier.
The Half Mile North location in Charleston had offered room for expansion. Eichelberger said the need had arrived sooner than expected. Office space is a blunt measure of growth, but a vivid one: sooner or later, another person needs somewhere to sit.
The headquarters and adjacent expansion described in Blue Acorn’s September 2014 announcement.
In April 2017, Beringer Capital acquired a majority stake in Blue Acorn. Eichelberger continued as CEO. The partnership brought resources and an opportunity to connect the agency’s capabilities with a wider set of services for brands.
He was explicit about the limits of expansion for its own sake. In a 2018 account of the acquisition market, he described the value of doing one thing well and working alongside complementary businesses. Providing more services did not automatically require buying every capability outright.
In April 2019, a larger combination arrived. Blue Acorn and iCiDIGITAL merged to form Blue Acorn iCi, acquiring direct-to-consumer commerce business BrandShop at the same time. Eichelberger and Greg Boone became co-CEOs of the combined firm, announced as a 400-person team.
Commerce, content, analytics, design, and engineering were coming together. To a client, that offered a broader range of help. Inside the business, it meant colleagues arriving with established ways of working and understandable affection for their own systems.
Revisiting that period with Ben Marks on the Commerce Famous podcast in 2024, Eichelberger described integration as a fresh challenge. Different businesses brought different processes, internal tools, and financial approaches. Choosing a common method required getting people to agree to change.
Marks had been Blue Acorn’s first employee. Their conversation carried the ease of people who remembered the smaller version of a company. For Eichelberger, the merger years had provided another education: the founder who knew how to build an agency had to sharpen his ability to bring organizations together.
Infosys subsequently acquired Blue Acorn iCi in October 2020. By the announcement of that transaction, the named co-CEOs were Boone and Chris Guerra. Eichelberger’s part in the company’s leadership belongs to its earlier formation and growth, before his work turned toward helping other founders.
A rather unusual beach souvenir
There was also the occasion when the technology arrived without an appointment. In May 2015, while in the Bahamas, Eichelberger helped find debris from a SpaceX Falcon 9 payload fairing washed ashore. Most holiday photographs require less aerospace hardware.
He posted pictures to Twitter, where his handle was @kpe. Elon Musk replied that the discovery could help SpaceX understand fairing reuse. Camera data recovered from the debris went back to the company.
The episode sits cheerfully outside the usual founder biography. There was no ecommerce strategy behind the wreckage coming ashore. There was, however, someone curious enough to investigate and make contact. For a few days, the commerce entrepreneur had a rather different technology story to tell.
The next beginning belongs to someone else
His connection to Blue Acorn has remained personal. He has written about seeing former colleagues at Shoptalk, following people who stayed with the company and those who moved into other leadership roles or founded businesses. Their progress is something he still wants to witness in person.
Through Oak Point Ventures, he has advised entrepreneurs facing the problems of growing their own businesses. The work gives his operating experience another use. A mistake made once can become a useful question for somebody approaching the same decision.
When he announced that he was joining SCRA as an investment manager in 2025, Eichelberger reflected on the help he could have sought earlier. People who had already built businesses might have helped him understand the challenges he was encountering. Supporting other entrepreneurs had become his professional mission.
That work now has an institutional setting. SCRA’s current team directory lists him as Director, SC Launch. The organization supports South Carolina technology businesses with resources and mentoring, while grants and investments provide different routes to capital. His attention has moved from the growth of one agency to the decisions facing other founders.
The personal details remain pleasingly resistant to executive polish. He has described choosing Android partly for the pleasure of teasing Apple enthusiasts. He prefers tea to coffee. A person can spend years studying customer behavior and still enjoy being a difficult customer in a friendly argument.
His career began with an expected climb through an established company. It became a lesson in building one, then combining businesses, then helping others begin. The grocery carts have long since given way to more complicated work. There are still people trying to move something forward. He has chosen to stay close enough to help.