During TheIndustry.fashion LIVE: Preparing for Peak today, 18 June, brands and retailers such as Marks & Spencer, Reiss, Urban Outfitters, Aligne, End Clothing, Harrods, Seraphine, JoJo Maman Bébé, and more were equipped with insights and inspiration to ensure they have the best chance at success for the golden quarter of 2024.
Hosted in partnership with Bleckmann, sponsored by Aptos and Shopline, and supported by Shoosmiths, the event invited fashion industry professionals to learn from brands, retailers and industry experts from the likes of Snapchat, Smythson, Stüssy and Nobody’s Child, amongst others, on how to plan now for promotions, stock availability, deliveries, and more to ensure they can capitalise on the most crucial trading period of the year.
The sessions
Optimising for Omnichannel
Kicking off the day’s panels, Aptos’ Unified Commerce Expert, Steve Ross, took centre stage to share his expertise. From his start in retail at 16 years old, Ross has witnessed the beginning of e-commerce and its shift to omnichannel. Now, retailers are moving towards unified commerce, which is what Aptos supplies.
Aptos offers online-based retail enterprise management solutions. The company makes all selling systems work together, from in-store to online, and connects the front of house with the back, including ensuring that warehouse fulfilment and store fulfilment run smoothly, especially during peak periods.
Running a store hasn’t changed that much, it’s the back of house that’s more recent. Omnichannel is relatively new and retailers are still learning about it.
When it comes to preparing for peak trading, Ross suggests these three things:
- Think about your network. Omnichannel is a huge chain. Where do you want your fulfilment to come from – the store or warehouse?
- What’s the right mix of product? Do not sell a £2 item during peak promotion and ship it for £5.
- Where are your bottlenecks? If your brand’s D2C channel is backed up around Christmas, leverage stores – e.g. from a marketing perspective push click-and-collect.
“Omnichannel is the biggest shift in retail in probably the last 50 years. There’s been nothing like this in retail in my lifetime. It’s all new. Expect to fail. If it’s going to break, it’s going to break at this time of year. You just need to plan for it. Accept there will be problems, but have a plan,” explained Ross.
Levelling up logistics
Bleckmann facilitates logistics and delivery services for global brands such as Gymshark, Patagonia, Abercrombie & Fitch, Superdry, and more. These services are critical for ensuring success during peak trading periods. To help, Erik Janssen Steenberg, Business Development Manager at Bleckmann, and his team take logistical burdens off of brands and retailers’ hands.
“We take away the pesky bit of supply management. We completely unburden the company as a whole. We want to free up their hands and thinking capacity without having additional problems coming from suppliers,” he emphasised.
Rachel Dyche, Sales Manager for the UK at Bleckmann, then stepped in to talk about the company’s rapid growth in the UK. When preparing for peak, the company requests sales expectations from brands at the start of the year. As for new clients, it forecasts and prepares them what they can anticipate for peak periods. The collected data allows Bleckmann to be flexible and to scale. But there is still an element of unknown during peak.
“We are agile and can provide pop-up warehouses and additional labour force if we need to,” said Dyche. “This ensures success for the brand during peak. We don’t want to inhibit grown by not being able to get these orders out the door. We rely on our infrastructure during these periods when it really matters.”
Get better ROI by reaching new customers on Snapchat
Claudine Clark, Senior Client Partner at Snapchat, was joined by Deepak Anand, General Manager at composable SAAS commerce platform Shopline, to discuss the benefits of using social media, particularly Snapchat, in engaging with consumers online.
With a mission to “empower every commerce organisation to achieve more”, Shopline helps brands to leverage social media to connect with consumers and sell via these platforms. “Social shopping is important to brands and retailers. It can even help returns rates go down as people use platforms like Snapchat to get feedback from friends and family,” emphasised Anand.
With 89% of people more likely to trust a product that one of their friends has endorsed, Snapchat allows consumers to connect with their nearest and dearest for advice online. Clark revealed that users are regularly chatting about shopping, so it makes perfect sense for brands and retailers to capitalise on this opportunity and make use of the platform’s social commerce and advertising capabilities.
From immersive full-screen adverts, which are easy to absorb and can be bolstered with AI to target specific consumers, to Augmented Reality (AR) activations to engage consumers with fun experiences, digital product try-ons and more, Snapchat allows businesses to showcase their products and build connections between users through various mediums. Another opportunity on the app is through key moments, using seasonal events such as back to school, Halloween, Valentine’s Day and Christmas. “Every moment is an opportunity to connect with consumers that you’ve not engaged with before,” Clark explained during the session.
Lessons from the e-commerce directors
For the penultimate session of the day, Seb Villien, Digital Director at Smythson, was joined Diego Fria, E-commerce Director at American fashion brand Stüssy, to continue the conversation about preparing for peak.
With particular reference to Black Friday, Villien discussed the differences between a selective and a blanket approach to promotions. “A blanket approach will result in bigger sales. However, a selective approach allows you to push the product you want to push and manage margins a bit more,” he said.
Having joined Smythson around five months ago, Villien is preparing for his first peak within the business. However, it’s not his first rodeo, having previously worked with fashion brands French Connection, White Stuff and FatFace. Thinking about his strategy and advice for peak, he said: “Customer experience is key – you need to make sure that every touchpoint encompasses your brand. Fo us, that’s the craftsmanship and British quality of the brand. In terms of preparing for peak demand, look at stock and ensure you can satisfy the demand,” Villien explained.
Fireside chat: success story
For the last, but certainly not least, panel of the day, Andrew Xeni, Founder and Chairman of Nobody’s Child, was on the hot seat.
Xeni’s family ran a small CMT factory in North London that supplied manufacturers. Despite resisting, he ended up in the fashion industry. 18 years ago, he and his brother established a manufacturing business that supplied George, New Look, Topshop, and more. They turned over £50-60 million a year in wholesale. When the Modern Day Slavery Act was signed, a lot of the landscape still did whatever they wanted. Xeni and his brother controlled their factories, so their passion led to building an ethical label – Nobody’s Child.
In terms of preparing for peak, the Nobody’s Child team are a well-oiled machine after nine years. They’ve got direct-to-consumer down to a T, which makes up 50% of the business. Last year, the company finally reached profitability, thanks to its relationship with Marks & Spencer. This was a huge turning point for the business. Nobody’s Child was the British retailer’s first third-party brand. In just four days of first going live with M&S, Nobody’s Child received 30% of its turnover. Now, the brand continues to grow, recently adding digital passports to its offering.
“We’re on a mission to convince the world you can produce better fashion consciously… We deliver that to the consumer at an affordable price. We don’t want to alienate any customers or commit to any age range. This is a good thing, not a great thing, because trying to dance at every wedding is challenging,” he said.
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