In this episode, Gavin Williams, former Global Director of Digital and E-commerce with luxury fragrance brand Creed, says we should put a ban on squirrel hunting, until we've figured out whether the squirrel is worth the hunt.
He takes Gordon and Ger (and you too, if you hit the play button) through the many things (so many) luxury retailers and brands are doing wrong (so very wrong). He pulls no punches. In fact, Gavin predicts that he'll never work in luxury again once this episode airs.
He talks the good, the bad and the insanely ugly when it comes to chasing the latest fad, building an attractive e-commerce experience, listening to customers, and putting your focus where it really matters for your business.
Listen and learn how, if it's on the skin, you win.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode of Dunctional and Dabulous...
Wait, who's been messing with my keyboard?
One person had F's that were the same as the D's of another person.
Right, we'll start again, we'll start again, we'll start again.
(00:21):
In this episode of Functional and Fabulous...
We've got an entire episode's worth of discussion...
That's not quite doing it for me.
I think we need something with a bit more excitement.
We need to really sell it, we need some jeopardy.
What's the threat that could destroy us?
Yes, exactly, perfect, perfect.
But what kind of threat, though?
There's so much squirrel hunting in our business.
(00:43):
Squirrel hunting?
Oh, sometimes I wonder why I bother.
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StudioForty9, where your digital retail success is built.
(01:04):
You're very welcome to today's episode of Functional & Fabulous.
We're thrilled to have Gavin Williams with us today, a distinguished leader in the digital and ecommerce space.
Gavin has very recently stepped down as the Global Director of Digital and Ecommerce at Creed, a luxury fragrance brand, and has had an impressive track record across some of the UK's most well-known brands and ecommerce businesses, including Farfetch, Liberty, The Wine Society, Lathwaites, Harvey Nichols and Auto Trader.
(01:35):
Known for his visionary approach and ability to drive transformative business changes, Gavin excels in providing clarity of vision and the momentum to deliver.
We're delighted to have him with us today because he's a man with an opinion and he's not afraid to wield it.
Gavin, thanks for joining us.
Oh, thanks very much.
That was an intro that my mother could have written.
Thank you very much.
(01:55):
Welcome to the podcast, Gavin.
I'm very excited to talk to you.
Great.
Good to see you guys.
So to kick us off, Gavin, when we spoke before the show, you used a phrase that I really like.
You said, there's so much squirrel hunting in our business and the older you get, the more you realise it's actually all about decision-making.
Can you tell us a little bit about that and your experience in the squirrel hunting end of things?
(02:19):
Yeah.
Well, it's funny you mentioned that.
The phrase came about because this is what my dog does on every occasion at the moment.
I just can't train the thing.
And I've often felt that way.
But on reflection, actually, I probably had that at a young age.
I think I've always had a healthy level of cynicism towards new ideas.
And it's not because I don't want new ideas or innovation.
(02:41):
It's just you need to kick the tyres on stuff.
And in our sector, certainly in the last 20 years since I've been involved in it, every six months, there is the new best big thing.
And that's cool because it's important that people want to sell us new ideas and they want to sell us the evolution of business and all that great stuff.
That's their jobs.
(03:01):
But our jobs is to go, is it though?
And really understand whether it's right for our business.
Now, there are some companies that run after everything because that's their model.
And that's okay.
I've worked for one of those.
It's okay.
But the key one, really, for all of us is, this is fantastic.
Isn't that wonderful?
But does it work for my business?
And even if the answer is yes to that, the key one's always been, but when?
(03:24):
It may not be today.
Because no matter what happens with all of this stuff, we've got infinite, we've got finite resource.
We're not Apple.
Even Apple have got finite resource, let's face it.
They can't do everything.
So marshalling your resources, maintaining your focus, number one learning in everything I've ever done is that.
And it can feel unsexy at times because you can have pressure coming down from your CEO saying, why aren't we doing VR this week?
(03:49):
And you go, yeah, because I've seen three of those and it doesn't really do anything for us.
That's a hard message to deliver sometimes because you get perceived to being anti something or negative towards something.
But it's just a basic human reaction to stuff should be, right, what are they trying to sell me?
Has it got legs?
Is it right for my business?
How much is it going to cost?
And is the timing right?
(04:10):
And it feels like quite a sensible way to approach these things, I think.
As trading conditions have got a good bit tougher over the last couple of years, do you think this is even more important now?
Yeah, I think so.
I do think so.
I think it's really interesting in the UK in particular at the moment, what's happening for the first time, it's not easy to walk into an ecommerce job.
(04:34):
And that's not happened since I've been involved in it.
We've been an excessive demand over supply.
It's tighter.
So all the messaging I'm getting over here is lean.
Things are lean, lean teams, lean solutions.
So it's been a real contraction in the last six months to 12 months.
(04:55):
Obviously, the other side of that, what's dominating that is budget cuts and tougher rules on budgets.
So I think it's definitely the case now that you're having to justify things much better and I think, or much harder.
And I think that's the right thing.
I think we've gone back to a sense of normality, to be honest with you.
The investment money's run out.
(05:16):
So a lot of companies don't have the money anymore to have their R&D teams or their special projects teams.
They're always the first things to go.
And when investment money is flowing freely, you can divert it to wherever you want it to go.
That market's not there in private equity and VC at the moment.
It's just not there at the moment.
We're hoping for a rebound, but that's definitely creating new pressures on us commercially, for sure.
(05:41):
Do you agree that businesses need to evolve and adopt new and innovative approaches on a regular basis?
And if so, how does a business distinguish then between shiny object chasing and then squirrel hunting and the difference between that and actual innovation?
Yeah, I'm a massive fan of it.
(06:03):
Don't get me wrong, when I say squirrel hunting can be a bad thing, it's more about those bigger ticket items that have no relevance to your business.
An example might be the metaverse, right?
So up until ChatGPT launched, if you look at the search trend for Metaverse, they were massive.
The moment ChatGPT launches, metaverse just dies because everyone's resources changed to this one thing, this new thing that is quite clearly extraordinary, which is AI.
(06:29):
Whereas previously, all the pressures in these companies and certainly in my world, in the luxury world, was how do we get advantage in this?
I seriously had people saying, what should we do on Roblox?
At the time I'm working for a fragrance business, absolutely nothing is what we should be doing on that at the moment.
We're given our other priorities.
But on a general point about innovation, let's separate innovation and disruption because I think it's important.
(06:55):
And disruption for a long time has been described as the sort of holy grail of innovation, if you like.
It's taking a business model, ripping it up and doing it again in a different way.
But I think it's a very adolescent approach to innovation.
And a lot of it's been funded by a huge amount of venture capital money, which allowed you to make huge amounts of losses for a large period of time while you try to make money.
(07:18):
I don't see that as innovation.
I just think that's just speculation.
It's almost like a destructive capitalism.
I don't like it.
But innovation should be a daily pursuit for all of us.
And I think what we tend to forget is we look at innovation as the big things and we don't look at it as those small incremental changes that we're doing, the marginal gains that we do, the test cases we run, the small elements that drive our business better.
(07:44):
And if innovation isn't focused around your vision about where you want to be as a business, it's not really innovation, it's distraction.
So that's kind of my view on it.
When I was at Auto Trader in the 90s, the most amazing digital transformation story in the UK, bar none, I urge anyone, it's not a sexy brand, but anyone who wants to see how a business changed itself when the internet happened and beat off all competitors, including Google, including eBay, and has a market share, which almost makes it a monopoly.
(08:12):
It's extraordinary.
That is the business.
But then we just called it R&D back in the day, which is called research and development.
We said the internet's happening.
What do you think we can do with the business on the internet?
And we diverted a bunch of money to do some tests.
The tests went well, we kept doing it.
And for me, that's true innovation.
You know, you test and learn.
That's something that's relevant to your business.
(08:32):
It's also you recognizing that there's something there that is a threat to your business.
And one of the key ones in innovation is what's the threat that could destroy us?
That's really interesting.
Can we delve into that?
Because I was going to actually ask if that was perceived as a threat or an opportunity, or was it a balance of both?
(08:52):
Because it's such a good story and a big change.
It's a balance of both.
I think there's a, what they realized is such a great story.
I mean I didn't realise, guys, but it was my first job I had, and it was the best job I had.
I had no idea because it was my first job.
I had no idea about how good that business was until I left it and saw other businesses.
And went, oh, I guess it's pretty well run.
(09:12):
Because retail isn't like that.
Retail is day-to-day short-termism.
They recognized two things that were quite clear.
There were two changes happening in the world at that time.
Obviously the internet, and then the digitisation of photography.
Now, their whole business was based on a newspaper, printed ads, and a photographer coming around to your house to take a picture of your car.
(09:34):
Well, imagine that.
If you're, I don't know, if you're under probably 40, under 30, you're not gonna realise that that was what it was.
There weren't cameras accessible.
It was just film.
Now, what they realised was that the internet, when Craigslist happened, was the ideal form of a search engine for classified ads.
In fact, it is the perfect medium for classified ads.
A search engine is perfect for it.
(09:55):
But secondly, they thought, oh my God, we actually can give our customers the means of production on photography because they've all got cameras, digital cameras, and they're gonna have cameras in their phones eventually.
And they went, if that happens, that's a fundamental threat to our model.
So we've got to embrace it now.
But they saw the opportunity and said, let's run it beside our magazine business, which is still growing.
(10:18):
But that's the clever aspect of what they did, was they recognised two technological changes that were happening and said, if we don't do this now, this is a massive threat to our business.
Now, if we do do it now, we know our competitors aren't gonna do it because we know those guys.
And they didn't do it, by the way.
I don't know if you guys remember a thing called Exchange and Mart.
I remember Exchange and Mart.
(10:39):
Well, where are all those guys now?
Where's Loot gone?
Where's Exchange?
If you lived in London, Loot was the thing in the 90s.
Everyone had Loot to find a house, find a car, find a squirrel.
It was all there, but all those things have gone.
Well, which brand survived?
It was Auto Trader.
So I think a brilliant management team that took the risk when they understood it was tough.
(11:01):
By the way, guys, it wasn't easy.
There were plenty of people in that business that were pushing back.
None of this is always easy.
It's a challenge.
But they were pushing back because it was a threat to their core business, their own region, their own territory.
And that's just natural human behavior, right?
So you just have to show the way.
So I think that's a good example of saying, look, if you took your assessment criteria and looked 20 years ahead on your business and said these two new technologies are here, are they a threat or not?
(11:29):
The only conclusion you could have had at the time was, my God, yeah.
So let's turn that into the opportunity.
We're the biggest player.
If we do this, we can dominate.
Now, remember at the time, no one was charging, right?
You couldn't charge what you did to do today for internet services.
So the key threat then was, can we make as much money as we do now with this new technology?
(11:53):
And the answer to that is, who knows?
But what could happen is another company comes in and says, I don't need to make as much money as them because I haven't got shareholders to please at their level.
I can actually come in and do this and undercut these guys.
What a brilliant position for me.
But no one was able to do it.
Great brand.
That's a great story.
(12:13):
I suppose there've been two big shifts.
One was, like, the emergence of the internet.
And then later there was the emergence of effectively the mobile internet because that's where usage really shifted.
And if we think about the position that retailers are in today or other businesses, there are now bombardments of what could be the next big thing.
(12:37):
And I think that's where some of the squirreling, as we'll call it, kind of comes from.
Because you're sitting there at your desk, you've fast forwarded and you're being hit with AI.
You're being hit with the metaverse.
You're being hit with blockchain and all of these kinds of things.
How do you even filter out the one that's going to be relevant to pursue from an R&D perspective?
(13:04):
Yeah, I think, let me tell you how not to do it, which will get us how to do it.
When I worked at Farfetch, for those that are familiar with the Farfetch story, it's a very interesting one.
And if you're not, it's worth reading about because it shows how, what was perceived to be an incredibly innovative business in luxury marketplace, overextended itself and ran after too many things, and lost its focus and ended up last year in a fire sale to a South Korean Amazon.
(13:33):
It's a real cautionary tale, I think, for all of us.
And what they didn't do, to your question, is they didn't have a criteria for assessment, in my experience.
So they ran after everything and people were way too excited about everything and it permeated the whole business.
And because it permeated the whole business, everyone felt that they had the opportunity to do that.
(13:54):
So it was just chaos, that's the way I would describe observing it.
I'm going, where is our focus here?
What is it we need to be as a business?
And I bet you, if you went around that business six years ago and said, well, what are we?
You'd get 20, 30, 40 different answers depending which day it was.
Honestly, I think you would.
Now, the key test to a business is going to be, what are we?
(14:16):
So what do we do?
What do we sell?
And who do we sell it to?
And then we say, right, those guys we're selling it to, what do they need?
How do they want to be spoken to?
Where do they consume their media?
And what are their purchasing behaviors?
When you reduce most of what we do as businesses, it's really simple.
It's really simple.
I've got a great product.
I've got a price the market wants.
(14:37):
And I've got a brand that people want to buy.
And then finally, I've got a distribution outlet to give it to them.
That essentially, guys, is business, in my world.
Now, when you start layering complexity on top, you start to lose focus of those four things.
You start to forget about the customer.
And I've been in many meetings, in many companies, where I've gone weeks without someone mentioning the word customer.
(14:58):
We've all had that.
Because you're in operations, you're in logistics, you're in all of this stuff.
And you're forgetting it.
So someone goes, oh, I've got this brilliant idea to solve logistics.
Yeah, great, that's fantastic.
It's really innovative.
Yeah, brilliant.
Oh, great, we'll go and do that.
Well, then you go, but how's that solving our business problem?
Well, that means I can't do this over here that I need to do in marketing.
(15:19):
Yeah, but what's the metaverse going to be, guys?
Now, a great leader and a great leadership team will look at those things and say, here's our core business.
How does it benefit those things?
And I think it's really hard sometimes for leaders to say no to things.
They have this internal pressure, internal fear that if they don't do it, they're going to be the one that misses out.
(15:42):
Now, that's not great leadership.
So my sort of answer to this is fantastic leaders are what makes the difference in terms of innovation.
I think I mentioned this previously, and if anyone has heard me speak before, I always say it.
But the best talk I ever went to, and he was a very, very incredible guy, worked with Steve Jobs.
(16:04):
And as much as none of us like using Apple as an example of stuff because they're an exceptionally unique business, but he was talking about when they launched the iPod and the whole focus was on three things.
That was all it was going to be, right?
It was about the battery life, so how long that battery would last, the amount of songs that you could have in your pocket and the speed it takes you to get to those songs, right?
(16:27):
And he said, if we get all that right, what an amazingly brilliant proposition that will be.
And they had that into their board.
So all the ideas that came in, they would judge against those three things.
And he would say brilliant ideas came in and really obvious things like someone said, we can put an FM transmitter radio here.
No problem.
They're so tiny now.
It won't compromise design, won't drain battery.
(16:49):
Let's just put one of those in.
And they had the courage to say, no, that's not what this is.
This is an iPod.
And it does these three things.
If you start overloading it with features, it's going to become something different.
Most of us don't do that, do we?
Most of us go, oh, great, you can fit it in.
Yeah, brilliant, no extra cost.
Oh, yeah, let's whack it in there.
And I think it's that type of decision-making that we, it's not as common as it probably should be, right?
(17:14):
It should be absolutely central to our proposition.
Luxury is very good at this, guys.
Luxury in terms of its brand stuff, its product, the things it produces.
So let's think about the actual products themselves.
It is laser-focused on brand and what the brand stands for.
It has a laser-focused opinion on what it should be.
(17:34):
And the brands that make mistakes are those, and you can see it through history, are those that lose that focus, or they take it in a direction that's too far for their consumers.
And I think that's a discipline that would benefit us all.
It's quite frustrating being in luxury, by the way, because you sit there and go, I'd like to do this.
And they just always say no.
But actually, it's for a good reason, because it's really focused on the brand is the number one thing.
(17:58):
If it's right for the brand, then it's right for us.
Luxury took a long time to adopt the internet and adopt ecommerce, a long time.
And it was always second to things.
And most of those brands are bigger than, more longevity than most of the other brands out there in the world.
They are the ones that last for a long time, because they put their business, their product, and their brand ahead of whatever is happening at that one moment in time.
(18:25):
So I think there are good lessons in that industry for this sort of thing.
It's an interesting one.
Going back to that whole idea of, you know, leadership and the focus on, let's say the laser-sharp focus on what you're doing and the ability to say no to things.
I suppose... I heard a talk last week and the discussion was around innovation and trying to understand what the customers might want, and how to identify the points when basically what you're doing is just wild guessing, was what the talk was kind of getting around to.
(18:58):
And sometimes I think, you know, you have that phrase of putting solutions before the problems or, you know, I've got a solution with a problem, you know, looking for a problem kind of a thing.
And it feels definitely for me at the moment anyway, AI and definitely the metaverse, but AI now is the thing where you're looking at it and you think, this is absolutely genius solution for something, but I have no idea still what I'm going to use it for other than maybe speeding up a couple of different processes and that side of things.
(19:29):
I think that's a good point.
I think my challenge with that is that the difference with AI is, even if you have a casual curiosity and have tried Midjourney or ChatGPT, it's so obvious today that you can see where it's going and it is phenomenally good.
My advice to everyone, and it's something that, you know, if I was to advise everyone on their career at the moment is find your curiosity about AI, because it's quite complex, isn't it?
(19:58):
Large language learning is not an easy thing to comprehend, right?
I consider myself a reasonably bright guy, but when I start to understand how the innards work of AI, I might just go, oh, I don't know.
But the outputs are extraordinary.
So I got myself looking at, as I went in and played with simple tasks, like how would I write SEO posts as an obvious thing, right?
(20:20):
Because I spend a lot of money on SEO companies.
I always get annoyed with them.
I find it the most frustrating of marketing channels.
And I was sitting there producing content by prompts with ChatGPT in less than 10 minutes that were far superior to anything that an agency had provided me ever, simple as that, which would take them two weeks to turn around.
(20:44):
Now, it would get me 65% of the way there and still need a rewrite to put the brand voice in, right?
That's okay, because I'd have to do that with an SEO firm.
Now I'm looking at that, if I'm in a digital marketing team at the moment, I'm a marketing manager, why am I not doing that?
I should be doing it myself or get one of my guys to do that stuff.
It's an hour of your day and you've suddenly got five fantastic articles that you can do that would have cost you, I don't know, 10 grand with your SEO agency in six weeks to do.
(21:12):
So it's a very simple example of what curiosity can give you.
Same with image and stuff.
I played with some imagery concepts because I wanted to try and bring, it was on Midjourney, it wasn't brilliant output, but the concepts came out really well.
So I was doing this idea of how do you make fragrance bottles sort of turn into Salvador Dali clockwork things, so like it's melting.
(21:32):
I'd just been to Barcelona, I just went to the Girona and all those areas and went to the Salvador Dali trail, so I was quite inspired by it.
And it was brilliant.
So I had a marketing manager come up to me and says, what, are you trying to do me out of a job?
I think she meant it.
And I thought, you can't see that what this is doing is giving you a really massive headstart to visualise concepts that you can then take to an art director or you can take to an agency.
(22:00):
This is where we need to go.
You're not being asked to finish the job, but what an incredibly powerful tool for this current generation of marketers, brilliant.
Yeah, for the ideation and the brainstorming.
Ideation, and then come to agencies and say, guys, this is kind of where we're thinking.
I need now your professional skills to take it where we need to be.
I'm like, I'm blown over by that.
(22:20):
I think that's fantastic.
So I think that curiosity, again, bring the curiosity back to the internet.
Like it was, when it started, no one knew anything about it.
So it was all about, we just got to play and try.
And I forget sometimes it's now the established way for everyone to market and everyone to produce content, all those good things.
(22:43):
But it wasn't 30 years ago.
So it was all new.
So you were testing it.
So I just say, look at it with fresh eyes and say, what could I do with fresh eyes?
And that's where AI, I think is phenomenal.
I think I would do brilliant work with that.
This raises an interesting question then about skills and coming back to your earlier point about they're not being, or they're being ecommerce people that are now no longer just able to walk into a role because there's so many open roles.
(23:12):
And what's your view on the type of skills then that the modern ecommerce exec, ecommerce manager, head of function should be developing?
And should they be tearing up some of the stuff that they have maybe done in the past and the playbooks that they've maybe used in the past?
(23:36):
Yeah, I think we should always be doing that is my answer to that.
I think I've always done that because I think I've been motivated by a deep insecurity of not knowing my future.
Same.
Yeah, it's my personality trait, but I don't think it's a bad one.
It's always made me worry about what would I do next and those things.
And so I've always thought about what is coming next and what my skills need to be.
(23:56):
The great message for ecommerce people is you are unique, in the sense that ecommerce people straddle so many disciplines in a business, right?
It can be operations, web technology, marketing, content, brand.
Ecommerce people should be all over that stuff.
There are very few disciplines in business that do so much within a business.
(24:19):
If you think about it, most of them are quite channeled into areas.
So I think, I hope what we'll see is a lot more of the future leaders coming from this category because it's just inherent in what they do is change, but also they see a broader business proposition.
So I think that's a real positive for e-com.
One of the negatives I've seen, I was interviewing for my own replacement, which is always quite an odd thing to do, but I think it showed the trust the business had in me, but it also allowed me to sort of, selfishly in many ways, benchmark myself.
(24:51):
And so what I saw was people are either experts in one area or another area.
So some come from quite strong marketing backgrounds in e-com and they're much more like traders.
Some have come from quite good technical backgrounds.
So they're platform developers or that's their thing.
They got to do a replatform project and they found their thing.
And some are operationally very strong.
(25:12):
What I saw was, actually, there's a lot of people that have gone really quickly through up to director level that perhaps wouldn't have got to director level in any other function.
And that's because of the law of supply and demand, really.
The skills have been developed over the last 20 years.
I think this next generation coming up are going to be more rounded, is my view.
(25:32):
But what I'm seeing is a more rounded individual with more business practice that's more closer to the business.
Whereas ecommerce was a bit of a sideshow for a lot of retailers.
It was 10% of their business, 15% of their business.
Now it's 40, 50%.
Well, that's a different ball game.
So you're seeing a different level of skill, I think, required for that.
So I think the key one, though, is not the actual skill.
(25:55):
It's the mindset, isn't it?
And curiosity is the biggest thing.
So if there are two things that I think have made my career, I'm not the best ecommerce guy in the world, for sure.
And that's why I've got great team to do that stuff.
But my curiosity about what's coming next and how things work, coupled with that simple thing we started with, what is a good business?
(26:17):
So let's not lose that whole thing about business.
The product, the price, the placement, positioning, all of those things that make it just a simple, good business.
If you haven't got that, refresh it.
You know, get those core skills.
Because if you want to have your sort of senior seat at the leadership table because you think you can do a better job, you need to be able to speak their language.
(26:39):
So get yourself wiser to this broader thing that's beyond AI, at the moment anyway, which is what humans bring to a business.
And that's about your decision-making, it's about your maturity, it's about your ability to get on with other people, get things done, be a mature leader.
Focus on those softer skills.
That would be my absolute message at the moment.
(27:00):
I'll tell you what I did in the last few years of my career.
I sort of took a right step back and said, I will just enable my team to get stuff done and I'll be a barrier between them and the madness that happens above, because it just does.
So I think that's where I would develop more.
So don't focus so much on just your technical skills.
Everyone can learn technical skills or be taught them.
(27:22):
Focus on those skills that make you a bloody good leader and a person that can influence the business in the direction you want it to go.
One of the things we talked about previously as well, so we've covered kind of the innovation side of things.
The focus on the customer.
An area that we don't often get a lot of time to talk about is the product.
(27:43):
I think that's partly because a lot of the people we speak to would be multi-brand retailers and don't necessarily always have the opportunity to work on the product.
But you talked about how important it was to spend maybe half your time pressuring your product.
And pressuring the product is something I haven't actually, is a term and phrase I haven't come across before.
Can you just speak to that a little bit?
(28:05):
Tell us what you meant by that.
I think there's two very good examples, you know.
Let's just go back to that Farfetch analogy, example rather than analogy, because we haven't, it was real.
There are a couple of companies that are doing really well in multi-brand retailing and luxury that haven't suffered from the fallout.
So quick recap, at the end of last year, Farfetch was on its knees and got bought, rescued.
(28:26):
Matches died, got bought by Frasers Group.
And then they subsequently said, well, we can't do anything with it.
Net-a-Porter has been up for sale for 20 years.
It's never made any money, right?
So it's an amazing brand that we all think is great.
But when you look at the accounts, it doesn't make any money.
So that multi-brand stuff is really hard in the luxury sector.
The other side of that is your department stores.
(28:47):
And that goes all the way down to your smaller stores.
Obviously, Debenhams goes, House of Fraser, disaster.
John Lewis is having a really tough time.
But also luxury stores are really suffering.
And in America, it's the same story.
It's even worse over there.
So multi-brand retailing is really tough.
(29:07):
There are a few people that are making it work.
And the ones that are making it work are the ones that are curating more.
So Mytheresa is a good example, which still doesn't make huge amounts of money, but they're not losing money, which I think is a result in the current climate for those guys.
Is that they've curated their offer, whereas when I was at Farfetch, it was always about how many products can we get?
Okay, 400,000, the more products we've got, the better it will be.
(29:28):
Because more products means more sales and more customers.
Your basic sort of starting point.
And then you go, well, actually, it's not true.
Because what you've got now is something, I can't find anything.
And I've got too many brands that shouldn't be on it.
And therefore people don't know what I stand for.
And my search engine isn't good enough.
And my algorithm isn't good enough.
Because my intelligence isn't good enough.
So what I've created is something that's deeply frustrating.
(29:51):
And then my conversion rate starts dying.
And I'm going, why is my conversion rate dying?
Because people can't find what they want.
It's a simple thing.
If your products and pricing's right, get it right.
So I think there's something in, if you're not talking and understanding what the consumer wants from your service, and it may not be that he wants more, or he or she just wants what's right for me.
The whole point of a search engine is to take millions of things and distill it into the things that are relevant to you, right?
(30:16):
That's the whole point.
And if you can't do that, what are you doing multi-brand for?
So what are you doing it for?
That if you've got brand A next to brand B, and those two brands are so, so separate, have no relation at all, as a consumer, I'm going, why are you serving me that?
I don't want that, I want this.
So I think there's something in that about, let's take it backwards.
(30:38):
If you're a multi-brand person that says, actually, less might be more here.
It actually might be.
And it might be the way for us to have a more distinct offering.
Because otherwise, we have just got all the same products that 50 other retailers out there have got.
And even though we're in luxury, which with my world, you end up competing on price because you don't own the product.
So I think that's number one.
I think let's start to really go back to, less could be more.
(31:02):
Not saying it would be, or definitely, but it could be for your business.
And that's all about merchandising strategies.
So the second one on product, I struggled with it.
I'm not saying I got it right.
But when I work brand-side, the brand guys can be really focused on international distribution, getting it out to distributors, getting it out to retailers, all that good stuff.
(31:24):
And on a B to C, we're saying, but what we need is exclusivity.
Because my B to C channel needs to offer something that I can't get anywhere else.
Otherwise, John Lewis is gonna have a sale next week.
And we can't compete when John Lewis has a sale.
So we need something.
So it's either a service proposition.
So example would be in fragrance, it would be engraving on products, personalisation.
(31:48):
Customers love personalisation at the moment.
That's a beautiful thing to double down on.
You know that your resellers who also sell your product, they couldn't do it.
It's too difficult for them.
It's too complex at the moment.
So that's great.
The second one in my sort of fragrance sector is sampling.
You really wanna get it.
We had a phrase, if it's on the skin, we win.
So we need to make sure that we get those samples out to people and we package it beautifully.
(32:11):
And then we have a beautiful redemption strategy because that's where we can offer value.
And again, those competitors can't do that.
Aw, fantastic.
Now, the universal things like universal free delivery, that used to be a really cool thing.
But everyone does that.
It doesn't really matter.
But a combination of those services and influencing the product team to focus on the less sexy stuff, like the sampling, like the mid-range gifts, the entry-level things that you need, 100% critical.
(32:37):
Where they can be focused is on the big stuff.
I need to get X amount of thousand products out to Harrods.
And I totally get that.
But if you want be a B2C strategy, when you've got them in Harrods and you've got them into your brand, the next purchase, this is the reality, you want it to be on your site.
And when they come to your site, you want it to be a value that no one else can offer.
(32:58):
So I think that's where I think you can influence products at that stage.
There is another part, which is that feedback loop.
What the internet gives us is incredible real-time information about the quality of our products and the reception of our products.
Now, luxury can be very hands-off still, which is we don't listen to customers like that.
We know our products are good.
(33:19):
We push them out there.
Well, they'll find their market.
If you're producing a widget that needs, is essential to run, let's say, this computer and it doesn't work, your business is doomed if you're getting bad reviews, isn't it?
It's gone.
Whereas that feedback loop's massive.
So what we try to encourage in Creed is really getting the feedback loop to the product team.
(33:41):
Not so much on the fragrance itself, because that would all be about your personal taste, but it would be, oh, the plastic cap doesn't fit well.
And then the question is, why have we got a plastic cap on a $300 fragrance, man?
So we change that.
Of course we do.
We make it this beautiful Zamex thing and all those cool things.
Or we're getting more feedback about labels coming off, what it might be.
(34:02):
So we've got a production issue that we can go and hunt and solve.
So I think there's that sense of the product team really understanding that the B2C guys are the first people to see the problems.
They're the first people to understand what's happening because we're talking to customers every day of the week.
And I know this sounds painfully obvious, guys, and every company should be doing it.
(34:23):
But good Lord, it amazes me how many companies don't do it.
It's actually interesting.
We did some work on a site recently and noticed while we were doing kind of a UX review how often the customers were reading the reviews by other customers.
And in those reviews, those other customers were talking about how important it was to have an additional product or an accessory product or that sort of thing.
(34:50):
And that accessory product wasn't available on the product detail page as an easy link, forcing the customer then to go hunting it down and occasionally it might have been out of stock and that sort of thing.
So you'd have a situation where your reviews were telling your customers how great this was, but you also needed product X, and then made it hard or not even possible to get product X.
(35:12):
And then, you know, so just that whole real-time feedback, even if it's not your own product, but it can be about the products that you're selling, is a critical thing.
It's really important to kind of keep tabs on all of that information that's coming back from your customers.
Yeah, I think it's also a great challenge for product guys.
You say, look, you know, they might turn around and say, well, that's not our company.
(35:33):
We don't do that.
You know, that's what we do.
So yeah, but there's a demand there.
So why don't you look at it and go, what would the luxury version of that be?
So I've got your constraint.
So what would it be?
Yeah, we don't do accessories.
But what if we did?
How would we do it?
How brilliant would we make it?
And how would we price it?
And that's hard because you're now telling, right, you product guys, you should be going into your innovation side.
(35:57):
What is it coming next?
Because honestly, even in luxury, no matter how much money you think the customers have got, the majority of the sales come through the mid-market, right?
The aspirational customers.
Those aspirational guys are the guys that keep you, you know, that sort of volume piece.
Your VIPs, your big spenders are really important.
They're so brilliant to you, but you can't double your VIP base in a year.
(36:20):
It just doesn't work that way.
So those guys want, and we did this beautiful thing, actually, on the Creed site.
It's a little 5ml atomizer spray.
You just pump it at the top of a fragrance and it fills up, with a beautiful sort of leather cover with our step and repeat logo and then dip them in different colours.
And I thought, this is it.
I just knew instinctively that when I touched it, and it felt heavy, it felt good.
(36:42):
I thought, this is what I want when I'm on holiday.
This is it.
This is the thing.
I don't want to take my bottle with me.
And it was phenomenal.
And it was our version of an upsell.
It was still £75, guys, but I can do an upsell for £75.
I can't do an upsell or cross sell for another fragrance at £300.
That's not going to happen if you're spending 300.
You don't spend another 300.
(37:04):
But what you can do is something that complements that beautiful purchase you've made and has got the same quality.
And we put a lot of pressure on the product guys.
And it actually came about because of China.
China is all over this stuff.
So everything in the Chinese market is GWP or it's added value.
It's their whole market, even if you're in luxury.
(37:26):
So we started to develop really cool things, high-quality items for that market that clearly worked for the Western market.
And they're super.
I've got a whole selection of them that I love.
And I think, wow, that's the right way of doing it.
So you don't have to dumb down.
I guess what I'm saying, you don't by having, exploring those alternatives, you're not trying to devalue the brand at all.
(37:46):
Your message to your brand team, the product team needs to be, we could do this, but what would our version of it be that's unbelievably cool?
And that's the way I would look at it.
That's a very interesting point.
That kind of upsell.
And I've seen that, especially in fragrances and so on.
That whole idea of the thing that you can take with you because you don't want to take the big bottle, which is very, very nice to look at and all the rest of it.
(38:06):
But it really doesn't go in a Ryanair bag.
Well, I presume the Creed people are not...
I presume we're talking, what is it, British Airways?...
I feel Club Europe.
Club Europe?
OK, lovely.
If it's Ryanair, they'd charge you to bring Creed on.
They charge you extra if you have Creed on you.
The question I wanted to ask just to wrap up, because we have to, we have to come towards the end, unfortunately.
(38:31):
But I was just very curious about, you know, for a luxury brand, a brand with heritage, a brand with provenance.
And as you pointed out, the luxury brands were slow to kind of get involved in online and ecommerce and so on.
What was it like to be kind of leading the digital charge for luxury brands?
(38:51):
You know, how do you bring that kind of, let's say, the provenance online, the sense of the brand online?
You know, I heard you speak about omnichannel and other areas like that and how in actual fact, like often it was about trying to get people into the store or like you said, you know, if you get it on the skin you win, there's an awful lot of touch and feel that you can't do online.
(39:14):
So what are you doing there?
Where do you focus?
Oh, do you know what?
I'll tell you my journey, it was horrible.
I mean, the whole thing has been horrible.
I won't mention it, but there's one company I worked on, I had to print off the website, guys, in the 2000s because the CEO, the creative director went to sign it off.
Yeah, I mean, let's just take some time to think about that.
(39:35):
I've had to do that too, Gavin.
In past lives, I've had to sit in the marketing director's office with the printouts of the website.
Yeah, I've actually had somebody where the laptop was placed in front of the CEO and then the marketing director operated it and moved around the website to explain, you know, what the whole thing was about, but yeah.
(40:00):
Yeah, well, it's still the case now.
You think, you know, what's the usage?
80-90% of our usage for websites is on mobile phones, and most of our leadership teams and CEOs look at our websites on their desktops because that's their work machine.
You know, there's no mobile first when it comes to that.
So I'd get lots of, like, stuff coming back even the last few years.
And yeah, it amused me.
Oh, you've changed this on the PDP on the desktop.
(40:21):
Not really.
I don't care about that.
Not top of my list.
No, not really.
But I kind of get it.
At least they're looking.
So I think it's been really tough.
I think one of the things was is that retail is so, it's much better than it was.
Of course it is.
And the mass market's so much stronger.
The sense in luxury is that you still cannot bring the experience alive.
(40:46):
And I still believe a lot of the brands feel this, honestly do, online, on your own website.
You'll see the brands are very, very good on TikTok now and brilliant on Insta.
All those great things about getting their marketing out there.
They've got over the aspect that they don't need to do cinema ads anymore, right?
So they've got over that aspect that they're not creating films anymore, that they can make it work for short form.
(41:08):
They've also got over the fact that they've let go of brands, that influencers can promote their stuff.
That never would have happened 10 years ago, right?
So they've got over that.
We don't own our brand anymore.
These guys own our brand.
We just need to shape them and make sure that we channel what we want through the right people.
So it's made huge leaps in marketing, like massive leaps.
(41:28):
I think when it comes to website design and website execution, I'd urge anyone to go and look at, let's say the top five luxury brands and come back and tell me if anything excites you.
And I'll tell you the answer now.
No, they're really badly done.
I'm sorry, they just are.
They sit on legacy technology platforms.
They're not very good.
They've never understood technology.
(41:49):
They still don't.
They don't know how to invest in it properly.
They don't understand product culture.
They don't understand that whole thing about what does product management mean and how do you execute?
It's great product merge.
You start with the customer.
They need access.
Sorry if we're going to be controversial and I'll get told off and probably never work in luxury again.
Lots of luxury brands don't care about that.
(42:12):
They don't poll their customers.
They don't do customer insight that way.
It's so rare that you go, right, we've polled these guys or we've done this and we've got these routes.
We're going to do this A, B test for X, Y, and Z.
The brand guy's going, no, you're not doing that because that button stays where it is.
Or that button colour stays what it is.
So I've been in all these meetings and I've seen them.
(42:34):
It's definitely changing.
So that balance between brand control and actual execution for the customer is still way too in favour of brand.
So what you're trying to do is you've got something like an incredible fragrance, you need to bring to life the ingredients in the story.
You've got to invest in a lot of media.
(42:56):
You've got to invest in a lot of creation of content.
And that budget still isn't big enough for me.
And I think the brand teams need to start releasing more money to their digital assets on their BSE to really drive and create the experience.
Fashion's got an inherent advantage in that they can do runway shows, and you can show that these beautiful items that blah, blah, blah.
(43:17):
But on ready to wear, most of the stuff is just the usual white backdrop photograph on a model and all that cool stuff.
And fine, it's okay.
It's not that inspiring.
It hasn't changed in 10 years.
So I think there is a challenge.
I don't know the answer.
I don't know what it is.
I think there's a challenge on creativity that maybe the web guys are being held back a little bit here.
(43:38):
But then your big brands do...
I don't know if you guys saw in, and it's worth having a look, John Lewis relaunched their site last year.
Sorry, John Lewis, but it's awful.
I mean, I don't know.
It just feels like it's been designed by the engineers and that's not an offense to engineers because I couldn't code, right?
But I wouldn't want you telling me how to do visual design either, engineer man.
(43:59):
So something's gone wrong there.
It's just awful, awful.
Even in the colour choices.
So you sort of sit there going, who is making these decisions 20 years on after we've had this massive ecommerce boom with Amazon?
Who's making these decisions?
I guarantee you, I guarantee you Gavin, it was a committee.
And there'll be like 10 people on it, and everyone will have their input, and everyone will have left happy knowing they've got their bit.
(44:27):
I feel that, like, we've got an entire episode's worth of discussion, probably on that one question that Ger just opened as a can of worms.
And here we are at the end of time.
Agh! You can tell I haven't spoken to anyone for a couple of weeks.
I've been doing the garden so I've just been eager just to talk.
(44:49):
It's just been me and my dog.
Honestly, I think we should come back and do, like, a whole episode on just bringing this to life.
And actually, why do the digital teams not get more of that brand budget?
I don't get it.
I do not get it.
It's the single biggest consumption of the eyeballs for your brand.
(45:09):
It's going to be your channel.
I just don't get it.
And on that note, Gavin just doesn't get it.
Which I now know that...
I'll put that on my LinkedIn.
I think that would be...
I think I'm going to steal that too actually.
I'm curious and I don't get it.
I'm curious and I don't get it.
(45:29):
Gavin, thanks a million for joining us today.
It's been a pleasure to have you.
Oh, thanks, guys.
It's really great to talk to you.
We'll release you back to the garden.
Oh, I can't wait.
Enjoy and thank you so much.
That was brilliant.
Thank you.
Have a great day, guys.
God, there was so much in that, Gordon.
You know, I was taking notes as I was reading my notes as I was listening to Gavin speak.
(45:53):
We could spend a lot of time unpacking a lot of that.
One thing that I just wanted to call out because I thought it was really...
It's insightful and obvious and I don't know, but I haven't heard it before.
Was that whole piece about how the search and the trends for metaverse dropped off a cliff entirely when ChatGPT became a thing.
I mean, even in our own podcast last year, we spoke about the metaverse a number of times.
(46:17):
I remember speaking about it right up until the point when ChatGPT started to take off and became a thing.
And it really is.
It's kind of like, oh wow, there it is writ large.
Humanity's, like, squirreling after shiny things' nature.
And I thought it was just an interesting point.
And I suppose the other thing then is that whole concept of, you know, solutions looking for problems.
(46:42):
I feel like in ecommerce and in modern-day retail, there are so many things that the technology is so far ahead of us in many ways.
It's ahead of our ability to use it.
I think I've said that before.
And then people and, you know, leadership teams and so on are kind of looking to say, well, look at all these solutions that are out there.
(47:03):
Surely we have a problem that fits that solution.
Are we missing something, you know?
Yeah, I think there's a bit of panic that you're going to miss the next big thing.
Like you don't want to miss the internet or whatever the next internet is.
But there's also so much coming at you on a daily basis.
So if you think maybe five years ago, Instagram was where it was at.
(47:26):
And it was about developing your Instagram presence.
And now you've got to develop your Instagram presence and your TikTok presence and your everything presence.
And then you were hit with the metaverse, which I was a bit cynical of, I think you might recall.
But then people were talking about getting a metaverse presence.
And I think Gavin referenced the Roblox presence there, which was left field.
(47:50):
That was a thing last week.
I was at a conference and Roblox came up.
Roadblocks?
Roblokes?
Yeah, I actually, unfortunately, I think it's Roblox.
I can't admit to knowing.
I wouldn't know.
So when asked what my Roblox strategy was...
You were like, I'm going to build a castle.
So, yeah, it was that thing.
(48:11):
And then that whole point about, I guess, leadership teams and then the criteria for assessment.
You know, effectively, the leadership teams are leadership teams because they should know what to do next and lead.
And I think, you know, not all leadership teams understand that that's partly their job.
And it's not their job to say, oh, here's a shiny thing.
(48:34):
We need to find a problem for it to solve.
It's their job to kind of to take a lead on things and say, OK, we're not doing that or we are doing this.
Or yes, we have a bit of R&D budget, maybe.
And we have the leisure and the time and the luxury of all of those things.
But this is our criteria for assessing whether or not that's going to be a success afterwards.
(48:57):
And I think kind of much like having a strategy, a vision and, you know, all of that kind of thing, that criteria for assessment is often missing.
Yeah, I think that was really interesting.
And the iPod example was super interesting.
It just really does it tick these three boxes.
If it doesn't tick one of these three boxes, then it's out.
I also think on the leadership point, very interesting.
(49:21):
And I'm sure anyone who's a head of ecommerce is probably like, yes, I feel that because they're across so many functions, which is why I think ecommerce people or ecommerce directors make great leadership team members because they're really good GMs. They have to balance that across multiple areas of their part of the business.
(49:45):
And to be able to bring that, that broad experience and combine that with strategic clarity.
And that would be that would be a great addition to any leadership team.
You do have, I suppose, one thing in ecommerce because it is broad and I think it's broad because it's young, I feel.
And over time, I've been seeing, you know, roles being created and as it's maturing, then you even, even recently we were talking about a business that had just gone online, had gone online for the first time.
(50:17):
So it was a B2B business and their point was, Okay, well, we spent the last two years solving an IT problem, which was how to get our business online and sell to our customers in the right way, the way that they're used to, how to, let's say, automate all of the manual interventions that we used to do previously, the workarounds and all of that kind of thing.
(50:40):
How do we how do we bring that online?
So this was a big IT problem that they had.
Now they've launched, the IT problem is solved in some ways and what they now need to do is change gears and move into, how do we use this as a marketing tool?
How are we leveraging this?
This great, let's say, sales tool and marketing tool in order to get in front of our customers.
(51:02):
But now that we have that, you know, do we still need to maintain some kind of an IT function?
Do we also need to have, like, somebody who works with the agency to manage and maintain, like, patches and security updates and all that kind of a thing?
And do we need somebody for marketing?
And do we need somebody for...
And the answer is, you kind of need somebody for all of those things.
And at the start, one or two people are probably going to wear an awful lot of hats and that's the kind of the youth in some ways of ecommerce.
(51:28):
And, you know, to your point, the people who've been involved in that sort of thing and had that practical experience have had the experience of having to join the dots cross-functionally and making sure...
And, you know, that is...
That's why I think they make great GMs. But then as businesses have grown and matured, then each of those disciplines has become a standout set of skills in its own right.
(51:53):
So a social media marketer or a performance marketer that specialises in social is going to be very different in terms of specialisation and skill set than a performance marketer who specialises in search.
Yep, yeah.
And as businesses have grown, those specialisations have become more apparent, but you still need somebody to stitch everything together.
(52:19):
In fact, stitching things together.
I think it's really interesting as we're seeing that maturity.
There was, like, so much we touched on there that we could have just talked for days and days and days together because of, I suppose, because of his experience seeing this evolution.
But the key takeaway message, again, a takeaway.
(52:43):
We all know I love a takeaway.
For me is, from Gavin, is having strategic clarity, being clear on what you want to do and then assessing every opportunity through that lens.
Yeah.
To enable you to make better decisions and focus increasingly limited resources because times are tougher.
(53:07):
Yeah.
On the things that are most important.
And another nod, the theme on every single podcast is brilliant basics.
Yet again, of focusing on the core of what the business is.
Back to the customer.
What's the customer telling you?
(53:28):
What are we selling?
Where are we selling it?
You know, do we have the price that people want?
Are we able to get it to the customers?
Those are all the fundamentals, and as we've heard before...
I saw something really stupid online a couple of weeks ago, and it really made me angry because obviously I'm very level-headed all the time.
(53:49):
But it did really make me twitch.
Someone was like, let's redefine the four P's.
And I was like, this is the most stupid thing ever.
It's product, price, place and people.
And that's it.
What did they want to do with this?
Oh, it was like, oh, I can't even, it made me boil so much.
(54:14):
I can't even remember what it was.
It was like, it was all to do with like, social media, basically.
I was like, this new four P's paradigm.
And it was like, actually, no, it's not.
It's like, is the product right?
Is it priced correctly?
Look, I feel a little pain because I was at some events recently and there was a lot of talk about like the three F's or the four D's or the five C's.
(54:40):
And even in some cases where people, one person had F's that were the same as the D's of another person.
And it started getting a bit ridiculous.
It's like my alphabet soup is better than your alphabet soup.
But at the end of the day, we all meant the same thing.
So, you know, it's kind of wasting your time here by it's all semantics, you know, when we're worried about the words.
(55:00):
But definitely the basics and keep keeping those things the same.
They're going to be the same anyway, regardless of what you call them.
The other areas that I kind of like this, this whole question of brand and product.
I love that opportunity, that thing, the if it's on the skin, we win.
I really like a phrase that people can hang their hat off of.
(55:21):
And like, of course, there's a load of things you can do off the back of that.
It doesn't mean that you've narrowed your world, but it means, Okay, if I'm trying to think of the assessment criteria for selling this product and I'm doing this online, how do I get it onto the skin of somebody so that they can actually smell what it's like, what the fragrance is like?
(55:42):
And obviously, you know, they produce the sample sets in the product here.
And I've seen that in other brands, a brand that I like, another fragrance brand, who basically produce a sample set, which actually it's cheaper by far than buying the product.
You can get like 12 of the product in a good size.
(56:07):
And it's not...
But it's not discounting, you know, so they haven't discounted this.
I mean, I mean, it's cheaper, but they haven't discounted it.
It's just, you know, it's just a bit less.
And then you get to pick the one you want.
Yeah.
Do you know who does this brilliantly in this space?
And they're, they're kind of, they're a high street brand, mid-market.
(56:28):
And I think, like, their stores are wonderful because and we've all been into them, and you'll be able to work out as I talk about it a little more.
But one of the things that they do online, and I think Gavin gave a nod to it, was like the ingredients or like what are the flavour components?
And they really bring their stories to life brilliantly.
(56:50):
So what was the inspiration?
What are the ingredients?
And then it shows you the ingredients.
And then it gives you the range of product.
And their stores present this beautifully.
Okay, it took me a while, it took me a while, but I got there...
And it's Rituals...
I was just about to say, will we get answers on a postcard?
Answers on a postcard, please.
(57:10):
To Donnybrook, Cork.
But Rituals do this, do this brilliantly well.
And if you want to see an example of product storytelling in store and online, I would hold them up as gold standards.
Yeah, I'd agree.
And do you know what is really nice?
(57:30):
One of the things that the Rituals did is that kind of focus around FOAM.
Because foam is what, if you think about Rituals or if you've ever used it, the foaming up capacity of the Ritual product is actually one of those unique things that you'd really remember.
But the FOAM is also their core principles and their value set that they explain to their employees.
(57:55):
I can't remember what the letters stand for, but it's an acronym for things like ownership and accountability and frontline first and stuff like this.
But every aspect of that business is about getting the FOAM onto the hand of the customer in some way.
And even by using the word foam, you're already able to imagine it.
It's nearly a sensory experience.
But Gordon, we have to leave it there.
(58:16):
We have to wrap up.
It's been a pleasure yet again.
Thanks everyone for listening and good day to everybody.
See you next time.
Bye.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous, with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman. If you'd like to know more about the podcast, or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode of Dunctional and Dabulous...
Wait, who's been messing with my keyboard?
One person had F's that were the same as the D's of another person.
Right, we'll start again, we'll start again, we'll start again.
(00:21):
In this episode of Functional and Fabulous...
We've got an entire episode's worth of discussion...
That's not quite doing it for me.
I think we need something with a bit more excitement.
We need to really sell it, we need some jeopardy.
What's the threat that could destroy us?
Yes, exactly, perfect, perfect.
But what kind of threat, though?
There's so much squirrel hunting in our business.
(00:43):
Squirrel hunting?
Oh, sometimes I wonder why I bother.
This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by StudioForty9, retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
StudioForty9, where your digital retail success is built.
(01:04):
You're very welcome to today's episode of Functional & Fabulous.
We're thrilled to have Gavin Williams with us today, a distinguished leader in the digital and ecommerce space.
Gavin has very recently stepped down as the Global Director of Digital and Ecommerce at Creed, a luxury fragrance brand, and has had an impressive track record across some of the UK's most well-known brands and ecommerce businesses, including Farfetch, Liberty, The Wine Society, Lathwaites, Harvey Nichols and Auto Trader.
(01:35):
Known for his visionary approach and ability to drive transformative business changes, Gavin excels in providing clarity of vision and the momentum to deliver.
We're delighted to have him with us today because he's a man with an opinion and he's not afraid to wield it.
Gavin, thanks for joining us.
Oh, thanks very much.
That was an intro that my mother could have written.
Thank you very much.
(01:55):
Welcome to the podcast, Gavin.
I'm very excited to talk to you.
Great.
Good to see you guys.
So to kick us off, Gavin, when we spoke before the show, you used a phrase that I really like.
You said, there's so much squirrel hunting in our business and the older you get, the more you realise it's actually all about decision-making.
Can you tell us a little bit about that and your experience in the squirrel hunting end of things?
(02:19):
Yeah.
Well, it's funny you mentioned that.
The phrase came about because this is what my dog does on every occasion at the moment.
I just can't train the thing.
And I've often felt that way.
But on reflection, actually, I probably had that at a young age.
I think I've always had a healthy level of cynicism towards new ideas.
And it's not because I don't want new ideas or innovation.
(02:41):
It's just you need to kick the tyres on stuff.
And in our sector, certainly in the last 20 years since I've been involved in it, every six months, there is the new best big thing.
And that's cool because it's important that people want to sell us new ideas and they want to sell us the evolution of business and all that great stuff.
That's their jobs.
(03:01):
But our jobs is to go, is it though?
And really understand whether it's right for our business.
Now, there are some companies that run after everything because that's their model.
And that's okay.
I've worked for one of those.
It's okay.
But the key one, really, for all of us is, this is fantastic.
Isn't that wonderful?
But does it work for my business?
And even if the answer is yes to that, the key one's always been, but when?
(03:24):
It may not be today.
Because no matter what happens with all of this stuff, we've got infinite, we've got finite resource.
We're not Apple.
Even Apple have got finite resource, let's face it.
They can't do everything.
So marshalling your resources, maintaining your focus, number one learning in everything I've ever done is that.
And it can feel unsexy at times because you can have pressure coming down from your CEO saying, why aren't we doing VR this week?
(03:49):
And you go, yeah, because I've seen three of those and it doesn't really do anything for us.
That's a hard message to deliver sometimes because you get perceived to being anti something or negative towards something.
But it's just a basic human reaction to stuff should be, right, what are they trying to sell me?
Has it got legs?
Is it right for my business?
How much is it going to cost?
And is the timing right?
(04:10):
And it feels like quite a sensible way to approach these things, I think.
As trading conditions have got a good bit tougher over the last couple of years, do you think this is even more important now?
Yeah, I think so.
I do think so.
I think it's really interesting in the UK in particular at the moment, what's happening for the first time, it's not easy to walk into an ecommerce job.
(04:34):
And that's not happened since I've been involved in it.
We've been an excessive demand over supply.
It's tighter.
So all the messaging I'm getting over here is lean.
Things are lean, lean teams, lean solutions.
So it's been a real contraction in the last six months to 12 months.
(04:55):
Obviously, the other side of that, what's dominating that is budget cuts and tougher rules on budgets.
So I think it's definitely the case now that you're having to justify things much better and I think, or much harder.
And I think that's the right thing.
I think we've gone back to a sense of normality, to be honest with you.
The investment money's run out.
(05:16):
So a lot of companies don't have the money anymore to have their R&D teams or their special projects teams.
They're always the first things to go.
And when investment money is flowing freely, you can divert it to wherever you want it to go.
That market's not there in private equity and VC at the moment.
It's just not there at the moment.
We're hoping for a rebound, but that's definitely creating new pressures on us commercially, for sure.
(05:41):
Do you agree that businesses need to evolve and adopt new and innovative approaches on a regular basis?
And if so, how does a business distinguish then between shiny object chasing and then squirrel hunting and the difference between that and actual innovation?
Yeah, I'm a massive fan of it.
(06:03):
Don't get me wrong, when I say squirrel hunting can be a bad thing, it's more about those bigger ticket items that have no relevance to your business.
An example might be the metaverse, right?
So up until ChatGPT launched, if you look at the search trend for Metaverse, they were massive.
The moment ChatGPT launches, metaverse just dies because everyone's resources changed to this one thing, this new thing that is quite clearly extraordinary, which is AI.
(06:29):
Whereas previously, all the pressures in these companies and certainly in my world, in the luxury world, was how do we get advantage in this?
I seriously had people saying, what should we do on Roblox?
At the time I'm working for a fragrance business, absolutely nothing is what we should be doing on that at the moment.
We're given our other priorities.
But on a general point about innovation, let's separate innovation and disruption because I think it's important.
(06:55):
And disruption for a long time has been described as the sort of holy grail of innovation, if you like.
It's taking a business model, ripping it up and doing it again in a different way.
But I think it's a very adolescent approach to innovation.
And a lot of it's been funded by a huge amount of venture capital money, which allowed you to make huge amounts of losses for a large period of time while you try to make money.
(07:18):
I don't see that as innovation.
I just think that's just speculation.
It's almost like a destructive capitalism.
I don't like it.
But innovation should be a daily pursuit for all of us.
And I think what we tend to forget is we look at innovation as the big things and we don't look at it as those small incremental changes that we're doing, the marginal gains that we do, the test cases we run, the small elements that drive our business better.
(07:44):
And if innovation isn't focused around your vision about where you want to be as a business, it's not really innovation, it's distraction.
So that's kind of my view on it.
When I was at Auto Trader in the 90s, the most amazing digital transformation story in the UK, bar none, I urge anyone, it's not a sexy brand, but anyone who wants to see how a business changed itself when the internet happened and beat off all competitors, including Google, including eBay, and has a market share, which almost makes it a monopoly.
(08:12):
It's extraordinary.
That is the business.
But then we just called it R&D back in the day, which is called research and development.
We said the internet's happening.
What do you think we can do with the business on the internet?
And we diverted a bunch of money to do some tests.
The tests went well, we kept doing it.
And for me, that's true innovation.
You know, you test and learn.
That's something that's relevant to your business.
(08:32):
It's also you recognizing that there's something there that is a threat to your business.
And one of the key ones in innovation is what's the threat that could destroy us?
That's really interesting.
Can we delve into that?
Because I was going to actually ask if that was perceived as a threat or an opportunity, or was it a balance of both?
(08:52):
Because it's such a good story and a big change.
It's a balance of both.
I think there's a, what they realized is such a great story.
I mean I didn't realise, guys, but it was my first job I had, and it was the best job I had.
I had no idea because it was my first job.
I had no idea about how good that business was until I left it and saw other businesses.
And went, oh, I guess it's pretty well run.
(09:12):
Because retail isn't like that.
Retail is day-to-day short-termism.
They recognized two things that were quite clear.
There were two changes happening in the world at that time.
Obviously the internet, and then the digitisation of photography.
Now, their whole business was based on a newspaper, printed ads, and a photographer coming around to your house to take a picture of your car.
(09:34):
Well, imagine that.
If you're, I don't know, if you're under probably 40, under 30, you're not gonna realise that that was what it was.
There weren't cameras accessible.
It was just film.
Now, what they realised was that the internet, when Craigslist happened, was the ideal form of a search engine for classified ads.
In fact, it is the perfect medium for classified ads.
A search engine is perfect for it.
(09:55):
But secondly, they thought, oh my God, we actually can give our customers the means of production on photography because they've all got cameras, digital cameras, and they're gonna have cameras in their phones eventually.
And they went, if that happens, that's a fundamental threat to our model.
So we've got to embrace it now.
But they saw the opportunity and said, let's run it beside our magazine business, which is still growing.
(10:18):
But that's the clever aspect of what they did, was they recognised two technological changes that were happening and said, if we don't do this now, this is a massive threat to our business.
Now, if we do do it now, we know our competitors aren't gonna do it because we know those guys.
And they didn't do it, by the way.
I don't know if you guys remember a thing called Exchange and Mart.
I remember Exchange and Mart.
(10:39):
Well, where are all those guys now?
Where's Loot gone?
Where's Exchange?
If you lived in London, Loot was the thing in the 90s.
Everyone had Loot to find a house, find a car, find a squirrel.
It was all there, but all those things have gone.
Well, which brand survived?
It was Auto Trader.
So I think a brilliant management team that took the risk when they understood it was tough.
(11:01):
By the way, guys, it wasn't easy.
There were plenty of people in that business that were pushing back.
None of this is always easy.
It's a challenge.
But they were pushing back because it was a threat to their core business, their own region, their own territory.
And that's just natural human behavior, right?
So you just have to show the way.
So I think that's a good example of saying, look, if you took your assessment criteria and looked 20 years ahead on your business and said these two new technologies are here, are they a threat or not?
(11:29):
The only conclusion you could have had at the time was, my God, yeah.
So let's turn that into the opportunity.
We're the biggest player.
If we do this, we can dominate.
Now, remember at the time, no one was charging, right?
You couldn't charge what you did to do today for internet services.
So the key threat then was, can we make as much money as we do now with this new technology?
(11:53):
And the answer to that is, who knows?
But what could happen is another company comes in and says, I don't need to make as much money as them because I haven't got shareholders to please at their level.
I can actually come in and do this and undercut these guys.
What a brilliant position for me.
But no one was able to do it.
Great brand.
That's a great story.
(12:13):
I suppose there've been two big shifts.
One was, like, the emergence of the internet.
And then later there was the emergence of effectively the mobile internet because that's where usage really shifted.
And if we think about the position that retailers are in today or other businesses, there are now bombardments of what could be the next big thing.
(12:37):
And I think that's where some of the squirreling, as we'll call it, kind of comes from.
Because you're sitting there at your desk, you've fast forwarded and you're being hit with AI.
You're being hit with the metaverse.
You're being hit with blockchain and all of these kinds of things.
How do you even filter out the one that's going to be relevant to pursue from an R&D perspective?
(13:04):
Yeah, I think, let me tell you how not to do it, which will get us how to do it.
When I worked at Farfetch, for those that are familiar with the Farfetch story, it's a very interesting one.
And if you're not, it's worth reading about because it shows how, what was perceived to be an incredibly innovative business in luxury marketplace, overextended itself and ran after too many things, and lost its focus and ended up last year in a fire sale to a South Korean Amazon.
(13:33):
It's a real cautionary tale, I think, for all of us.
And what they didn't do, to your question, is they didn't have a criteria for assessment, in my experience.
So they ran after everything and people were way too excited about everything and it permeated the whole business.
And because it permeated the whole business, everyone felt that they had the opportunity to do that.
(13:54):
So it was just chaos, that's the way I would describe observing it.
I'm going, where is our focus here?
What is it we need to be as a business?
And I bet you, if you went around that business six years ago and said, well, what are we?
You'd get 20, 30, 40 different answers depending which day it was.
Honestly, I think you would.
Now, the key test to a business is going to be, what are we?
(14:16):
So what do we do?
What do we sell?
And who do we sell it to?
And then we say, right, those guys we're selling it to, what do they need?
How do they want to be spoken to?
Where do they consume their media?
And what are their purchasing behaviors?
When you reduce most of what we do as businesses, it's really simple.
It's really simple.
I've got a great product.
I've got a price the market wants.
(14:37):
And I've got a brand that people want to buy.
And then finally, I've got a distribution outlet to give it to them.
That essentially, guys, is business, in my world.
Now, when you start layering complexity on top, you start to lose focus of those four things.
You start to forget about the customer.
And I've been in many meetings, in many companies, where I've gone weeks without someone mentioning the word customer.
(14:58):
We've all had that.
Because you're in operations, you're in logistics, you're in all of this stuff.
And you're forgetting it.
So someone goes, oh, I've got this brilliant idea to solve logistics.
Yeah, great, that's fantastic.
It's really innovative.
Yeah, brilliant.
Oh, great, we'll go and do that.
Well, then you go, but how's that solving our business problem?
Well, that means I can't do this over here that I need to do in marketing.
(15:19):
Yeah, but what's the metaverse going to be, guys?
Now, a great leader and a great leadership team will look at those things and say, here's our core business.
How does it benefit those things?
And I think it's really hard sometimes for leaders to say no to things.
They have this internal pressure, internal fear that if they don't do it, they're going to be the one that misses out.
(15:42):
Now, that's not great leadership.
So my sort of answer to this is fantastic leaders are what makes the difference in terms of innovation.
I think I mentioned this previously, and if anyone has heard me speak before, I always say it.
But the best talk I ever went to, and he was a very, very incredible guy, worked with Steve Jobs.
(16:04):
And as much as none of us like using Apple as an example of stuff because they're an exceptionally unique business, but he was talking about when they launched the iPod and the whole focus was on three things.
That was all it was going to be, right?
It was about the battery life, so how long that battery would last, the amount of songs that you could have in your pocket and the speed it takes you to get to those songs, right?
(16:27):
And he said, if we get all that right, what an amazingly brilliant proposition that will be.
And they had that into their board.
So all the ideas that came in, they would judge against those three things.
And he would say brilliant ideas came in and really obvious things like someone said, we can put an FM transmitter radio here.
No problem.
They're so tiny now.
It won't compromise design, won't drain battery.
(16:49):
Let's just put one of those in.
And they had the courage to say, no, that's not what this is.
This is an iPod.
And it does these three things.
If you start overloading it with features, it's going to become something different.
Most of us don't do that, do we?
Most of us go, oh, great, you can fit it in.
Yeah, brilliant, no extra cost.
Oh, yeah, let's whack it in there.
And I think it's that type of decision-making that we, it's not as common as it probably should be, right?
(17:14):
It should be absolutely central to our proposition.
Luxury is very good at this, guys.
Luxury in terms of its brand stuff, its product, the things it produces.
So let's think about the actual products themselves.
It is laser-focused on brand and what the brand stands for.
It has a laser-focused opinion on what it should be.
(17:34):
And the brands that make mistakes are those, and you can see it through history, are those that lose that focus, or they take it in a direction that's too far for their consumers.
And I think that's a discipline that would benefit us all.
It's quite frustrating being in luxury, by the way, because you sit there and go, I'd like to do this.
And they just always say no.
But actually, it's for a good reason, because it's really focused on the brand is the number one thing.
(17:58):
If it's right for the brand, then it's right for us.
Luxury took a long time to adopt the internet and adopt ecommerce, a long time.
And it was always second to things.
And most of those brands are bigger than, more longevity than most of the other brands out there in the world.
They are the ones that last for a long time, because they put their business, their product, and their brand ahead of whatever is happening at that one moment in time.
(18:25):
So I think there are good lessons in that industry for this sort of thing.
It's an interesting one.
Going back to that whole idea of, you know, leadership and the focus on, let's say the laser-sharp focus on what you're doing and the ability to say no to things.
I suppose... I heard a talk last week and the discussion was around innovation and trying to understand what the customers might want, and how to identify the points when basically what you're doing is just wild guessing, was what the talk was kind of getting around to.
(18:58):
And sometimes I think, you know, you have that phrase of putting solutions before the problems or, you know, I've got a solution with a problem, you know, looking for a problem kind of a thing.
And it feels definitely for me at the moment anyway, AI and definitely the metaverse, but AI now is the thing where you're looking at it and you think, this is absolutely genius solution for something, but I have no idea still what I'm going to use it for other than maybe speeding up a couple of different processes and that side of things.
(19:29):
I think that's a good point.
I think my challenge with that is that the difference with AI is, even if you have a casual curiosity and have tried Midjourney or ChatGPT, it's so obvious today that you can see where it's going and it is phenomenally good.
My advice to everyone, and it's something that, you know, if I was to advise everyone on their career at the moment is find your curiosity about AI, because it's quite complex, isn't it?
(19:58):
Large language learning is not an easy thing to comprehend, right?
I consider myself a reasonably bright guy, but when I start to understand how the innards work of AI, I might just go, oh, I don't know.
But the outputs are extraordinary.
So I got myself looking at, as I went in and played with simple tasks, like how would I write SEO posts as an obvious thing, right?
(20:20):
Because I spend a lot of money on SEO companies.
I always get annoyed with them.
I find it the most frustrating of marketing channels.
And I was sitting there producing content by prompts with ChatGPT in less than 10 minutes that were far superior to anything that an agency had provided me ever, simple as that, which would take them two weeks to turn around.
(20:44):
Now, it would get me 65% of the way there and still need a rewrite to put the brand voice in, right?
That's okay, because I'd have to do that with an SEO firm.
Now I'm looking at that, if I'm in a digital marketing team at the moment, I'm a marketing manager, why am I not doing that?
I should be doing it myself or get one of my guys to do that stuff.
It's an hour of your day and you've suddenly got five fantastic articles that you can do that would have cost you, I don't know, 10 grand with your SEO agency in six weeks to do.
(21:12):
So it's a very simple example of what curiosity can give you.
Same with image and stuff.
I played with some imagery concepts because I wanted to try and bring, it was on Midjourney, it wasn't brilliant output, but the concepts came out really well.
So I was doing this idea of how do you make fragrance bottles sort of turn into Salvador Dali clockwork things, so like it's melting.
(21:32):
I'd just been to Barcelona, I just went to the Girona and all those areas and went to the Salvador Dali trail, so I was quite inspired by it.
And it was brilliant.
So I had a marketing manager come up to me and says, what, are you trying to do me out of a job?
I think she meant it.
And I thought, you can't see that what this is doing is giving you a really massive headstart to visualise concepts that you can then take to an art director or you can take to an agency.
(22:00):
This is where we need to go.
You're not being asked to finish the job, but what an incredibly powerful tool for this current generation of marketers, brilliant.
Yeah, for the ideation and the brainstorming.
Ideation, and then come to agencies and say, guys, this is kind of where we're thinking.
I need now your professional skills to take it where we need to be.
I'm like, I'm blown over by that.
(22:20):
I think that's fantastic.
So I think that curiosity, again, bring the curiosity back to the internet.
Like it was, when it started, no one knew anything about it.
So it was all about, we just got to play and try.
And I forget sometimes it's now the established way for everyone to market and everyone to produce content, all those good things.
(22:43):
But it wasn't 30 years ago.
So it was all new.
So you were testing it.
So I just say, look at it with fresh eyes and say, what could I do with fresh eyes?
And that's where AI, I think is phenomenal.
I think I would do brilliant work with that.
This raises an interesting question then about skills and coming back to your earlier point about they're not being, or they're being ecommerce people that are now no longer just able to walk into a role because there's so many open roles.
(23:12):
And what's your view on the type of skills then that the modern ecommerce exec, ecommerce manager, head of function should be developing?
And should they be tearing up some of the stuff that they have maybe done in the past and the playbooks that they've maybe used in the past?
(23:36):
Yeah, I think we should always be doing that is my answer to that.
I think I've always done that because I think I've been motivated by a deep insecurity of not knowing my future.
Same.
Yeah, it's my personality trait, but I don't think it's a bad one.
It's always made me worry about what would I do next and those things.
And so I've always thought about what is coming next and what my skills need to be.
(23:56):
The great message for ecommerce people is you are unique, in the sense that ecommerce people straddle so many disciplines in a business, right?
It can be operations, web technology, marketing, content, brand.
Ecommerce people should be all over that stuff.
There are very few disciplines in business that do so much within a business.
(24:19):
If you think about it, most of them are quite channeled into areas.
So I think, I hope what we'll see is a lot more of the future leaders coming from this category because it's just inherent in what they do is change, but also they see a broader business proposition.
So I think that's a real positive for e-com.
One of the negatives I've seen, I was interviewing for my own replacement, which is always quite an odd thing to do, but I think it showed the trust the business had in me, but it also allowed me to sort of, selfishly in many ways, benchmark myself.
(24:51):
And so what I saw was people are either experts in one area or another area.
So some come from quite strong marketing backgrounds in e-com and they're much more like traders.
Some have come from quite good technical backgrounds.
So they're platform developers or that's their thing.
They got to do a replatform project and they found their thing.
And some are operationally very strong.
(25:12):
What I saw was, actually, there's a lot of people that have gone really quickly through up to director level that perhaps wouldn't have got to director level in any other function.
And that's because of the law of supply and demand, really.
The skills have been developed over the last 20 years.
I think this next generation coming up are going to be more rounded, is my view.
(25:32):
But what I'm seeing is a more rounded individual with more business practice that's more closer to the business.
Whereas ecommerce was a bit of a sideshow for a lot of retailers.
It was 10% of their business, 15% of their business.
Now it's 40, 50%.
Well, that's a different ball game.
So you're seeing a different level of skill, I think, required for that.
So I think the key one, though, is not the actual skill.
(25:55):
It's the mindset, isn't it?
And curiosity is the biggest thing.
So if there are two things that I think have made my career, I'm not the best ecommerce guy in the world, for sure.
And that's why I've got great team to do that stuff.
But my curiosity about what's coming next and how things work, coupled with that simple thing we started with, what is a good business?
(26:17):
So let's not lose that whole thing about business.
The product, the price, the placement, positioning, all of those things that make it just a simple, good business.
If you haven't got that, refresh it.
You know, get those core skills.
Because if you want to have your sort of senior seat at the leadership table because you think you can do a better job, you need to be able to speak their language.
(26:39):
So get yourself wiser to this broader thing that's beyond AI, at the moment anyway, which is what humans bring to a business.
And that's about your decision-making, it's about your maturity, it's about your ability to get on with other people, get things done, be a mature leader.
Focus on those softer skills.
That would be my absolute message at the moment.
(27:00):
I'll tell you what I did in the last few years of my career.
I sort of took a right step back and said, I will just enable my team to get stuff done and I'll be a barrier between them and the madness that happens above, because it just does.
So I think that's where I would develop more.
So don't focus so much on just your technical skills.
Everyone can learn technical skills or be taught them.
(27:22):
Focus on those skills that make you a bloody good leader and a person that can influence the business in the direction you want it to go.
One of the things we talked about previously as well, so we've covered kind of the innovation side of things.
The focus on the customer.
An area that we don't often get a lot of time to talk about is the product.
(27:43):
I think that's partly because a lot of the people we speak to would be multi-brand retailers and don't necessarily always have the opportunity to work on the product.
But you talked about how important it was to spend maybe half your time pressuring your product.
And pressuring the product is something I haven't actually, is a term and phrase I haven't come across before.
Can you just speak to that a little bit?
(28:05):
Tell us what you meant by that.
I think there's two very good examples, you know.
Let's just go back to that Farfetch analogy, example rather than analogy, because we haven't, it was real.
There are a couple of companies that are doing really well in multi-brand retailing and luxury that haven't suffered from the fallout.
So quick recap, at the end of last year, Farfetch was on its knees and got bought, rescued.
(28:26):
Matches died, got bought by Frasers Group.
And then they subsequently said, well, we can't do anything with it.
Net-a-Porter has been up for sale for 20 years.
It's never made any money, right?
So it's an amazing brand that we all think is great.
But when you look at the accounts, it doesn't make any money.
So that multi-brand stuff is really hard in the luxury sector.
The other side of that is your department stores.
(28:47):
And that goes all the way down to your smaller stores.
Obviously, Debenhams goes, House of Fraser, disaster.
John Lewis is having a really tough time.
But also luxury stores are really suffering.
And in America, it's the same story.
It's even worse over there.
So multi-brand retailing is really tough.
(29:07):
There are a few people that are making it work.
And the ones that are making it work are the ones that are curating more.
So Mytheresa is a good example, which still doesn't make huge amounts of money, but they're not losing money, which I think is a result in the current climate for those guys.
Is that they've curated their offer, whereas when I was at Farfetch, it was always about how many products can we get?
Okay, 400,000, the more products we've got, the better it will be.
(29:28):
Because more products means more sales and more customers.
Your basic sort of starting point.
And then you go, well, actually, it's not true.
Because what you've got now is something, I can't find anything.
And I've got too many brands that shouldn't be on it.
And therefore people don't know what I stand for.
And my search engine isn't good enough.
And my algorithm isn't good enough.
Because my intelligence isn't good enough.
So what I've created is something that's deeply frustrating.
(29:51):
And then my conversion rate starts dying.
And I'm going, why is my conversion rate dying?
Because people can't find what they want.
It's a simple thing.
If your products and pricing's right, get it right.
So I think there's something in, if you're not talking and understanding what the consumer wants from your service, and it may not be that he wants more, or he or she just wants what's right for me.
The whole point of a search engine is to take millions of things and distill it into the things that are relevant to you, right?
(30:16):
That's the whole point.
And if you can't do that, what are you doing multi-brand for?
So what are you doing it for?
That if you've got brand A next to brand B, and those two brands are so, so separate, have no relation at all, as a consumer, I'm going, why are you serving me that?
I don't want that, I want this.
So I think there's something in that about, let's take it backwards.
(30:38):
If you're a multi-brand person that says, actually, less might be more here.
It actually might be.
And it might be the way for us to have a more distinct offering.
Because otherwise, we have just got all the same products that 50 other retailers out there have got.
And even though we're in luxury, which with my world, you end up competing on price because you don't own the product.
So I think that's number one.
I think let's start to really go back to, less could be more.
(31:02):
Not saying it would be, or definitely, but it could be for your business.
And that's all about merchandising strategies.
So the second one on product, I struggled with it.
I'm not saying I got it right.
But when I work brand-side, the brand guys can be really focused on international distribution, getting it out to distributors, getting it out to retailers, all that good stuff.
(31:24):
And on a B to C, we're saying, but what we need is exclusivity.
Because my B to C channel needs to offer something that I can't get anywhere else.
Otherwise, John Lewis is gonna have a sale next week.
And we can't compete when John Lewis has a sale.
So we need something.
So it's either a service proposition.
So example would be in fragrance, it would be engraving on products, personalisation.
(31:48):
Customers love personalisation at the moment.
That's a beautiful thing to double down on.
You know that your resellers who also sell your product, they couldn't do it.
It's too difficult for them.
It's too complex at the moment.
So that's great.
The second one in my sort of fragrance sector is sampling.
You really wanna get it.
We had a phrase, if it's on the skin, we win.
So we need to make sure that we get those samples out to people and we package it beautifully.
(32:11):
And then we have a beautiful redemption strategy because that's where we can offer value.
And again, those competitors can't do that.
Aw, fantastic.
Now, the universal things like universal free delivery, that used to be a really cool thing.
But everyone does that.
It doesn't really matter.
But a combination of those services and influencing the product team to focus on the less sexy stuff, like the sampling, like the mid-range gifts, the entry-level things that you need, 100% critical.
(32:37):
Where they can be focused is on the big stuff.
I need to get X amount of thousand products out to Harrods.
And I totally get that.
But if you want be a B2C strategy, when you've got them in Harrods and you've got them into your brand, the next purchase, this is the reality, you want it to be on your site.
And when they come to your site, you want it to be a value that no one else can offer.
(32:58):
So I think that's where I think you can influence products at that stage.
There is another part, which is that feedback loop.
What the internet gives us is incredible real-time information about the quality of our products and the reception of our products.
Now, luxury can be very hands-off still, which is we don't listen to customers like that.
We know our products are good.
(33:19):
We push them out there.
Well, they'll find their market.
If you're producing a widget that needs, is essential to run, let's say, this computer and it doesn't work, your business is doomed if you're getting bad reviews, isn't it?
It's gone.
Whereas that feedback loop's massive.
So what we try to encourage in Creed is really getting the feedback loop to the product team.
(33:41):
Not so much on the fragrance itself, because that would all be about your personal taste, but it would be, oh, the plastic cap doesn't fit well.
And then the question is, why have we got a plastic cap on a $300 fragrance, man?
So we change that.
Of course we do.
We make it this beautiful Zamex thing and all those cool things.
Or we're getting more feedback about labels coming off, what it might be.
(34:02):
So we've got a production issue that we can go and hunt and solve.
So I think there's that sense of the product team really understanding that the B2C guys are the first people to see the problems.
They're the first people to understand what's happening because we're talking to customers every day of the week.
And I know this sounds painfully obvious, guys, and every company should be doing it.
(34:23):
But good Lord, it amazes me how many companies don't do it.
It's actually interesting.
We did some work on a site recently and noticed while we were doing kind of a UX review how often the customers were reading the reviews by other customers.
And in those reviews, those other customers were talking about how important it was to have an additional product or an accessory product or that sort of thing.
(34:50):
And that accessory product wasn't available on the product detail page as an easy link, forcing the customer then to go hunting it down and occasionally it might have been out of stock and that sort of thing.
So you'd have a situation where your reviews were telling your customers how great this was, but you also needed product X, and then made it hard or not even possible to get product X.
(35:12):
And then, you know, so just that whole real-time feedback, even if it's not your own product, but it can be about the products that you're selling, is a critical thing.
It's really important to kind of keep tabs on all of that information that's coming back from your customers.
Yeah, I think it's also a great challenge for product guys.
You say, look, you know, they might turn around and say, well, that's not our company.
(35:33):
We don't do that.
You know, that's what we do.
So yeah, but there's a demand there.
So why don't you look at it and go, what would the luxury version of that be?
So I've got your constraint.
So what would it be?
Yeah, we don't do accessories.
But what if we did?
How would we do it?
How brilliant would we make it?
And how would we price it?
And that's hard because you're now telling, right, you product guys, you should be going into your innovation side.
(35:57):
What is it coming next?
Because honestly, even in luxury, no matter how much money you think the customers have got, the majority of the sales come through the mid-market, right?
The aspirational customers.
Those aspirational guys are the guys that keep you, you know, that sort of volume piece.
Your VIPs, your big spenders are really important.
They're so brilliant to you, but you can't double your VIP base in a year.
(36:20):
It just doesn't work that way.
So those guys want, and we did this beautiful thing, actually, on the Creed site.
It's a little 5ml atomizer spray.
You just pump it at the top of a fragrance and it fills up, with a beautiful sort of leather cover with our step and repeat logo and then dip them in different colours.
And I thought, this is it.
I just knew instinctively that when I touched it, and it felt heavy, it felt good.
(36:42):
I thought, this is what I want when I'm on holiday.
This is it.
This is the thing.
I don't want to take my bottle with me.
And it was phenomenal.
And it was our version of an upsell.
It was still £75, guys, but I can do an upsell for £75.
I can't do an upsell or cross sell for another fragrance at £300.
That's not going to happen if you're spending 300.
You don't spend another 300.
(37:04):
But what you can do is something that complements that beautiful purchase you've made and has got the same quality.
And we put a lot of pressure on the product guys.
And it actually came about because of China.
China is all over this stuff.
So everything in the Chinese market is GWP or it's added value.
It's their whole market, even if you're in luxury.
(37:26):
So we started to develop really cool things, high-quality items for that market that clearly worked for the Western market.
And they're super.
I've got a whole selection of them that I love.
And I think, wow, that's the right way of doing it.
So you don't have to dumb down.
I guess what I'm saying, you don't by having, exploring those alternatives, you're not trying to devalue the brand at all.
(37:46):
Your message to your brand team, the product team needs to be, we could do this, but what would our version of it be that's unbelievably cool?
And that's the way I would look at it.
That's a very interesting point.
That kind of upsell.
And I've seen that, especially in fragrances and so on.
That whole idea of the thing that you can take with you because you don't want to take the big bottle, which is very, very nice to look at and all the rest of it.
(38:06):
But it really doesn't go in a Ryanair bag.
Well, I presume the Creed people are not...
I presume we're talking, what is it, British Airways?...
I feel Club Europe.
Club Europe?
OK, lovely.
If it's Ryanair, they'd charge you to bring Creed on.
They charge you extra if you have Creed on you.
The question I wanted to ask just to wrap up, because we have to, we have to come towards the end, unfortunately.
(38:31):
But I was just very curious about, you know, for a luxury brand, a brand with heritage, a brand with provenance.
And as you pointed out, the luxury brands were slow to kind of get involved in online and ecommerce and so on.
What was it like to be kind of leading the digital charge for luxury brands?
(38:51):
You know, how do you bring that kind of, let's say, the provenance online, the sense of the brand online?
You know, I heard you speak about omnichannel and other areas like that and how in actual fact, like often it was about trying to get people into the store or like you said, you know, if you get it on the skin you win, there's an awful lot of touch and feel that you can't do online.
(39:14):
So what are you doing there?
Where do you focus?
Oh, do you know what?
I'll tell you my journey, it was horrible.
I mean, the whole thing has been horrible.
I won't mention it, but there's one company I worked on, I had to print off the website, guys, in the 2000s because the CEO, the creative director went to sign it off.
Yeah, I mean, let's just take some time to think about that.
(39:35):
I've had to do that too, Gavin.
In past lives, I've had to sit in the marketing director's office with the printouts of the website.
Yeah, I've actually had somebody where the laptop was placed in front of the CEO and then the marketing director operated it and moved around the website to explain, you know, what the whole thing was about, but yeah.
(40:00):
Yeah, well, it's still the case now.
You think, you know, what's the usage?
80-90% of our usage for websites is on mobile phones, and most of our leadership teams and CEOs look at our websites on their desktops because that's their work machine.
You know, there's no mobile first when it comes to that.
So I'd get lots of, like, stuff coming back even the last few years.
And yeah, it amused me.
Oh, you've changed this on the PDP on the desktop.
(40:21):
Not really.
I don't care about that.
Not top of my list.
No, not really.
But I kind of get it.
At least they're looking.
So I think it's been really tough.
I think one of the things was is that retail is so, it's much better than it was.
Of course it is.
And the mass market's so much stronger.
The sense in luxury is that you still cannot bring the experience alive.
(40:46):
And I still believe a lot of the brands feel this, honestly do, online, on your own website.
You'll see the brands are very, very good on TikTok now and brilliant on Insta.
All those great things about getting their marketing out there.
They've got over the aspect that they don't need to do cinema ads anymore, right?
So they've got over that aspect that they're not creating films anymore, that they can make it work for short form.
(41:08):
They've also got over the fact that they've let go of brands, that influencers can promote their stuff.
That never would have happened 10 years ago, right?
So they've got over that.
We don't own our brand anymore.
These guys own our brand.
We just need to shape them and make sure that we channel what we want through the right people.
So it's made huge leaps in marketing, like massive leaps.
(41:28):
I think when it comes to website design and website execution, I'd urge anyone to go and look at, let's say the top five luxury brands and come back and tell me if anything excites you.
And I'll tell you the answer now.
No, they're really badly done.
I'm sorry, they just are.
They sit on legacy technology platforms.
They're not very good.
They've never understood technology.
(41:49):
They still don't.
They don't know how to invest in it properly.
They don't understand product culture.
They don't understand that whole thing about what does product management mean and how do you execute?
It's great product merge.
You start with the customer.
They need access.
Sorry if we're going to be controversial and I'll get told off and probably never work in luxury again.
Lots of luxury brands don't care about that.
(42:12):
They don't poll their customers.
They don't do customer insight that way.
It's so rare that you go, right, we've polled these guys or we've done this and we've got these routes.
We're going to do this A, B test for X, Y, and Z.
The brand guy's going, no, you're not doing that because that button stays where it is.
Or that button colour stays what it is.
So I've been in all these meetings and I've seen them.
(42:34):
It's definitely changing.
So that balance between brand control and actual execution for the customer is still way too in favour of brand.
So what you're trying to do is you've got something like an incredible fragrance, you need to bring to life the ingredients in the story.
You've got to invest in a lot of media.
(42:56):
You've got to invest in a lot of creation of content.
And that budget still isn't big enough for me.
And I think the brand teams need to start releasing more money to their digital assets on their BSE to really drive and create the experience.
Fashion's got an inherent advantage in that they can do runway shows, and you can show that these beautiful items that blah, blah, blah.
(43:17):
But on ready to wear, most of the stuff is just the usual white backdrop photograph on a model and all that cool stuff.
And fine, it's okay.
It's not that inspiring.
It hasn't changed in 10 years.
So I think there is a challenge.
I don't know the answer.
I don't know what it is.
I think there's a challenge on creativity that maybe the web guys are being held back a little bit here.
(43:38):
But then your big brands do...
I don't know if you guys saw in, and it's worth having a look, John Lewis relaunched their site last year.
Sorry, John Lewis, but it's awful.
I mean, I don't know.
It just feels like it's been designed by the engineers and that's not an offense to engineers because I couldn't code, right?
But I wouldn't want you telling me how to do visual design either, engineer man.
(43:59):
So something's gone wrong there.
It's just awful, awful.
Even in the colour choices.
So you sort of sit there going, who is making these decisions 20 years on after we've had this massive ecommerce boom with Amazon?
Who's making these decisions?
I guarantee you, I guarantee you Gavin, it was a committee.
And there'll be like 10 people on it, and everyone will have their input, and everyone will have left happy knowing they've got their bit.
(44:27):
I feel that, like, we've got an entire episode's worth of discussion, probably on that one question that Ger just opened as a can of worms.
And here we are at the end of time.
Agh! You can tell I haven't spoken to anyone for a couple of weeks.
I've been doing the garden so I've just been eager just to talk.
(44:49):
It's just been me and my dog.
Honestly, I think we should come back and do, like, a whole episode on just bringing this to life.
And actually, why do the digital teams not get more of that brand budget?
I don't get it.
I do not get it.
It's the single biggest consumption of the eyeballs for your brand.
(45:09):
It's going to be your channel.
I just don't get it.
And on that note, Gavin just doesn't get it.
Which I now know that...
I'll put that on my LinkedIn.
I think that would be...
I think I'm going to steal that too actually.
I'm curious and I don't get it.
I'm curious and I don't get it.
(45:29):
Gavin, thanks a million for joining us today.
It's been a pleasure to have you.
Oh, thanks, guys.
It's really great to talk to you.
We'll release you back to the garden.
Oh, I can't wait.
Enjoy and thank you so much.
That was brilliant.
Thank you.
Have a great day, guys.
God, there was so much in that, Gordon.
You know, I was taking notes as I was reading my notes as I was listening to Gavin speak.
(45:53):
We could spend a lot of time unpacking a lot of that.
One thing that I just wanted to call out because I thought it was really...
It's insightful and obvious and I don't know, but I haven't heard it before.
Was that whole piece about how the search and the trends for metaverse dropped off a cliff entirely when ChatGPT became a thing.
I mean, even in our own podcast last year, we spoke about the metaverse a number of times.
(46:17):
I remember speaking about it right up until the point when ChatGPT started to take off and became a thing.
And it really is.
It's kind of like, oh wow, there it is writ large.
Humanity's, like, squirreling after shiny things' nature.
And I thought it was just an interesting point.
And I suppose the other thing then is that whole concept of, you know, solutions looking for problems.
(46:42):
I feel like in ecommerce and in modern-day retail, there are so many things that the technology is so far ahead of us in many ways.
It's ahead of our ability to use it.
I think I've said that before.
And then people and, you know, leadership teams and so on are kind of looking to say, well, look at all these solutions that are out there.
(47:03):
Surely we have a problem that fits that solution.
Are we missing something, you know?
Yeah, I think there's a bit of panic that you're going to miss the next big thing.
Like you don't want to miss the internet or whatever the next internet is.
But there's also so much coming at you on a daily basis.
So if you think maybe five years ago, Instagram was where it was at.
(47:26):
And it was about developing your Instagram presence.
And now you've got to develop your Instagram presence and your TikTok presence and your everything presence.
And then you were hit with the metaverse, which I was a bit cynical of, I think you might recall.
But then people were talking about getting a metaverse presence.
And I think Gavin referenced the Roblox presence there, which was left field.
(47:50):
That was a thing last week.
I was at a conference and Roblox came up.
Roadblocks?
Roblokes?
Yeah, I actually, unfortunately, I think it's Roblox.
I can't admit to knowing.
I wouldn't know.
So when asked what my Roblox strategy was...
You were like, I'm going to build a castle.
So, yeah, it was that thing.
(48:11):
And then that whole point about, I guess, leadership teams and then the criteria for assessment.
You know, effectively, the leadership teams are leadership teams because they should know what to do next and lead.
And I think, you know, not all leadership teams understand that that's partly their job.
And it's not their job to say, oh, here's a shiny thing.
(48:34):
We need to find a problem for it to solve.
It's their job to kind of to take a lead on things and say, OK, we're not doing that or we are doing this.
Or yes, we have a bit of R&D budget, maybe.
And we have the leisure and the time and the luxury of all of those things.
But this is our criteria for assessing whether or not that's going to be a success afterwards.
(48:57):
And I think kind of much like having a strategy, a vision and, you know, all of that kind of thing, that criteria for assessment is often missing.
Yeah, I think that was really interesting.
And the iPod example was super interesting.
It just really does it tick these three boxes.
If it doesn't tick one of these three boxes, then it's out.
I also think on the leadership point, very interesting.
(49:21):
And I'm sure anyone who's a head of ecommerce is probably like, yes, I feel that because they're across so many functions, which is why I think ecommerce people or ecommerce directors make great leadership team members because they're really good GMs. They have to balance that across multiple areas of their part of the business.
(49:45):
And to be able to bring that, that broad experience and combine that with strategic clarity.
And that would be that would be a great addition to any leadership team.
You do have, I suppose, one thing in ecommerce because it is broad and I think it's broad because it's young, I feel.
And over time, I've been seeing, you know, roles being created and as it's maturing, then you even, even recently we were talking about a business that had just gone online, had gone online for the first time.
(50:17):
So it was a B2B business and their point was, Okay, well, we spent the last two years solving an IT problem, which was how to get our business online and sell to our customers in the right way, the way that they're used to, how to, let's say, automate all of the manual interventions that we used to do previously, the workarounds and all of that kind of thing.
(50:40):
How do we how do we bring that online?
So this was a big IT problem that they had.
Now they've launched, the IT problem is solved in some ways and what they now need to do is change gears and move into, how do we use this as a marketing tool?
How are we leveraging this?
This great, let's say, sales tool and marketing tool in order to get in front of our customers.
(51:02):
But now that we have that, you know, do we still need to maintain some kind of an IT function?
Do we also need to have, like, somebody who works with the agency to manage and maintain, like, patches and security updates and all that kind of a thing?
And do we need somebody for marketing?
And do we need somebody for...
And the answer is, you kind of need somebody for all of those things.
And at the start, one or two people are probably going to wear an awful lot of hats and that's the kind of the youth in some ways of ecommerce.
(51:28):
And, you know, to your point, the people who've been involved in that sort of thing and had that practical experience have had the experience of having to join the dots cross-functionally and making sure...
And, you know, that is...
That's why I think they make great GMs. But then as businesses have grown and matured, then each of those disciplines has become a standout set of skills in its own right.
(51:53):
So a social media marketer or a performance marketer that specialises in social is going to be very different in terms of specialisation and skill set than a performance marketer who specialises in search.
Yep, yeah.
And as businesses have grown, those specialisations have become more apparent, but you still need somebody to stitch everything together.
(52:19):
In fact, stitching things together.
I think it's really interesting as we're seeing that maturity.
There was, like, so much we touched on there that we could have just talked for days and days and days together because of, I suppose, because of his experience seeing this evolution.
But the key takeaway message, again, a takeaway.
(52:43):
We all know I love a takeaway.
For me is, from Gavin, is having strategic clarity, being clear on what you want to do and then assessing every opportunity through that lens.
Yeah.
To enable you to make better decisions and focus increasingly limited resources because times are tougher.
(53:07):
Yeah.
On the things that are most important.
And another nod, the theme on every single podcast is brilliant basics.
Yet again, of focusing on the core of what the business is.
Back to the customer.
What's the customer telling you?
(53:28):
What are we selling?
Where are we selling it?
You know, do we have the price that people want?
Are we able to get it to the customers?
Those are all the fundamentals, and as we've heard before...
I saw something really stupid online a couple of weeks ago, and it really made me angry because obviously I'm very level-headed all the time.
(53:49):
But it did really make me twitch.
Someone was like, let's redefine the four P's.
And I was like, this is the most stupid thing ever.
It's product, price, place and people.
And that's it.
What did they want to do with this?
Oh, it was like, oh, I can't even, it made me boil so much.
(54:14):
I can't even remember what it was.
It was like, it was all to do with like, social media, basically.
I was like, this new four P's paradigm.
And it was like, actually, no, it's not.
It's like, is the product right?
Is it priced correctly?
Look, I feel a little pain because I was at some events recently and there was a lot of talk about like the three F's or the four D's or the five C's.
(54:40):
And even in some cases where people, one person had F's that were the same as the D's of another person.
And it started getting a bit ridiculous.
It's like my alphabet soup is better than your alphabet soup.
But at the end of the day, we all meant the same thing.
So, you know, it's kind of wasting your time here by it's all semantics, you know, when we're worried about the words.
(55:00):
But definitely the basics and keep keeping those things the same.
They're going to be the same anyway, regardless of what you call them.
The other areas that I kind of like this, this whole question of brand and product.
I love that opportunity, that thing, the if it's on the skin, we win.
I really like a phrase that people can hang their hat off of.
(55:21):
And like, of course, there's a load of things you can do off the back of that.
It doesn't mean that you've narrowed your world, but it means, Okay, if I'm trying to think of the assessment criteria for selling this product and I'm doing this online, how do I get it onto the skin of somebody so that they can actually smell what it's like, what the fragrance is like?
(55:42):
And obviously, you know, they produce the sample sets in the product here.
And I've seen that in other brands, a brand that I like, another fragrance brand, who basically produce a sample set, which actually it's cheaper by far than buying the product.
You can get like 12 of the product in a good size.
(56:07):
And it's not...
But it's not discounting, you know, so they haven't discounted this.
I mean, I mean, it's cheaper, but they haven't discounted it.
It's just, you know, it's just a bit less.
And then you get to pick the one you want.
Yeah.
Do you know who does this brilliantly in this space?
And they're, they're kind of, they're a high street brand, mid-market.
(56:28):
And I think, like, their stores are wonderful because and we've all been into them, and you'll be able to work out as I talk about it a little more.
But one of the things that they do online, and I think Gavin gave a nod to it, was like the ingredients or like what are the flavour components?
And they really bring their stories to life brilliantly.
(56:50):
So what was the inspiration?
What are the ingredients?
And then it shows you the ingredients.
And then it gives you the range of product.
And their stores present this beautifully.
Okay, it took me a while, it took me a while, but I got there...
And it's Rituals...
I was just about to say, will we get answers on a postcard?
Answers on a postcard, please.
(57:10):
To Donnybrook, Cork.
But Rituals do this, do this brilliantly well.
And if you want to see an example of product storytelling in store and online, I would hold them up as gold standards.
Yeah, I'd agree.
And do you know what is really nice?
(57:30):
One of the things that the Rituals did is that kind of focus around FOAM.
Because foam is what, if you think about Rituals or if you've ever used it, the foaming up capacity of the Ritual product is actually one of those unique things that you'd really remember.
But the FOAM is also their core principles and their value set that they explain to their employees.
(57:55):
I can't remember what the letters stand for, but it's an acronym for things like ownership and accountability and frontline first and stuff like this.
But every aspect of that business is about getting the FOAM onto the hand of the customer in some way.
And even by using the word foam, you're already able to imagine it.
It's nearly a sensory experience.
But Gordon, we have to leave it there.
(58:16):
We have to wrap up.
It's been a pleasure yet again.
Thanks everyone for listening and good day to everybody.
See you next time.
Bye.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous, with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman. If you'd like to know more about the podcast, or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
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