AI Search Is Just SEO, the Case for In-Person Demo Days & 21 Years of Ecommerce with Stuart Foster

Hey, I’m Stuart Foster, the Director of Revenue at Anatomy Warehouse. I lead the marketing and sales teams. It’s a pretty interesting niche industry. We sell anatomical models, charts and specimens, as well as mannequins, simulators and task trainers, all in the medical education and healthcare space.

I started my career in advertising, but I’ve always had a healthcare bent and fascination. My grandparents were both doctors and my parents were both educators, so this niche felt like a natural fit. It’s more fun to market something when you’re actually helping people while you’re doing it, and making a meaningful difference in the world certainly appealed to me.

We’re in an interesting space where so many things have gone virtual that there’s a bit of a backlash, and hands-on, analog experiences are making a huge resurgence. Our products are mostly physical: you can hold them and see them. If you’re learning a blood draw, you’re doing it on an actual mannequin arm rather than in a virtual reality space, and we don’t think anything is better than doing something as close to the real thing as possible.
You don’t have to stick your friends like you did in nursing school. You can insert the needle as many times as you want and get a feel for the skin tension and how the blood flows. You can’t get that without the tactile sensation. It’s one thing to do it virtually and another to do it with a live patient in the room reacting.

We have three distinct groups. The first is the student, anything from nursing and pre-med to EMS, fire and police training for disaster scenarios or run-of-the-mill patient treatment. The second is the teacher, who’s teaching those skills and getting students certified, and certification is a big part of this. The third is the procurement folks who are trying to help outfit these people.

We’re an original ecommerce company. We started just over 21 years ago, back in 2005, and we’ve sold on everything from eBay to Magento. Now we’re on Amazon, and of course on our own site, anatomywarehouse.com, which is where most people find us. We have a heavy digital presence, and we’re as targeted as we can be using a combination of email, OTT, digital advertising and social programs.

I mostly use it for number crunching and analysis. You still need a human in the loop for a lot of things. I find it especially useful for finding patterns in data and spotting obvious problems. I’m using the desktop version of Claude Code, and I use a few different skills to bounce ideas off. One I really like is called the decision council, which gives me a variety of perspectives on how I’d approach something.
For the most part it’s number crunching within Excel and looking for specific opportunities. I view AI as just another interface. In previous incarnations you had the mouse; now you type in what you’d like the thing to do. I’m used to that from watching all the Star Trek.

I think AI search and SEO are largely the same thing. It’s basically gaming, or trying to be as relevant as possible, for the crawlers. Right now the weighting within models probably trends toward user-generated content, although there’s been some talk of Reddit being left out of some search results, particularly in GPT.
But everyone is still trying to get to the right answer, so the fundamentals really haven’t changed. It’s just the sourcing and the weighting, and how those shift over time. Objective sources like Wikipedia will always be the ultimate trust signal. For one, they outlaw most LLMs on their platform. And if civilization goes south, at least Wikipedia will still be standing, especially since you can have it offline.

We do, and we’re in a variety of spaces. Some of our competitors are, in essence, our distributors, as well as some of the partners we work with, depending on whether a manufacturer goes to a sole-source contract where you have to go direct. What we pride ourselves on is that at Anatomy Warehouse we can build a package of products that serves your needs without relying on any one vendor over another. We can help you make the best decision possible for both your students and your budget.

Knowledge of the subject, and being able to pull from a wide variety of brands. We carry everything from Erler Zimmer phantoms and a 3D-printed anatomy series to simulator task trainers like the V2 airway trainer. We’re constantly looking for new partners and new technology to feature on our website.
The 3D-printed series is almost identical to a cadaver. It’s a cured resin model that looks nearly the same, and the only difference you can really feel is the touch, because it’s a hard surface rather than the squishy feel of a real organ. On the simulator side, the weight of the head and how it feels make it seem like an actual person rather than just a mannequin. A lot of people look at healthcare mannequins and are a little terrified because of the uncanny valley. The fidelity is going to get a lot closer, but you still want to be working on the mannequin before you’re working on the human.

Just be curious. And realize that you’re never going to be the first, no matter how brilliant your idea is. There are always established players in any niche, and there’s a lot to learn from them, including what they’ve stumbled upon along the way. But it’s up to you to define your own spin on that niche, and that’s what can really make a difference.

I’ll give you a SKU, because that’s how cool I am: A104267, our standard life-size skeleton from Axis Scientific. It’s fully mountable, holds up really well, and comes with a three-year warranty. Secondarily, we have the Anatomy Lab IV arm. For about $154 you can pick up a reusable IV arm that lets you learn all sorts of functionality for phlebotomy and venipuncture. It’s a one-stop shop for how to work on an arm.

It’s impossible to predict the future right now, as the last few years have shown us. It’s a challenging environment, particularly as a distributor and manufacturer. Stability is what most businesses need, and there hasn’t been a lot of it.
But if you keep working, stay in your lane, create great products and provide the best experience for folks, there’s meaningful growth to be had, and we’re really excited for the years ahead. We’re also excited to jump into more outbound selling. We’ve been primarily an ecommerce and inbound-marketing-led organization, and now we’re going out into the ether and working with new partners. That’s what I’m excited about for the next few years.

I appreciate it, Stephen. Thank you for having me.