Multi-channel retailing is the buzzword of the era. But the differing paths retailers take to get there are illuminating, and offer a revealing glimpse into why attitudes differ between companies of varying sizes. Aurora Fashions, the British owner of clothing brands including Coast, Warehouse and Oasis, is a mid-sized retailer that, in the words of its chief executive, Mike Shearwood, is prone to the odd “mutation”. “One of the guys from Oasis came and asked for £2,000 to develop something in 2009,” he recalls. The result, he says, was fashion retail’s first transactional iPhone app. “Sales through mobile now are 10% of the digital channel.”
Letting things happen and following the customer is the modus operandi. “We have integrated our IT, e-commerce and retail teams. They all talk to each other and don’t do things in silos. When they develop something, they do it with another relevant part of the business. The testing is much quicker than the old way of doing IT projects, and a lot more flexible.”
If Aurora adopts technology through evolutionary mutation, then John Lewis, another British retailer with a turnover approximately ten times the size of Aurora’s, adopts technology through intelligent design.
The company's commercial director, Andrea O’Donnell, was in charge of transforming John Lewis into a multi-channel retailer—a project that spanned along the supply chain from a new automated distribution centre to rewriting the job description of its shop-floor staff and overhauling its website. “Four years ago, we made a decision to be a multi-channel retailer because we recognised that added value to shopping,” she says.
The project included customer research, a dramatic expansion of the number of products stocked online and retraining its 27,000 partners in what customer service means.
“We spent a lot of time with partners talking about the changing nature of the shopping experience and how more shopping trips started online. We turned them into brand advocates, changed their job description and their KPIs [key performance indicators]. That was a key area.”
That meant explaining to a traditional workforce who have been trained to “think that good service was selling physical products to a customer in a shop” that they were also responsible for online sales in their catchment. For Ms O’Donnell, multi-channel represented a leap of faith: “It was a big gulp to swallow.” It was a bet, in the form of tens of millions of capital expenditure, placed on the basis of a long-term vision of consumer behavior—not a £2,000 punt on a smartphone app.
