How L'Occitane, AllSaints, Dr. Martens Are Figuring Out Seamless Shopping
The ability to deliver seamless and consistent brand messages across all channels remains a challenge for retailers, especially with live shopping, according to a panel of fashion and skincare retailers.
Speaking at Retail Week’s annual conference on Feb. 11 in London, Cherie Amner, L'Occitane digital and CRM director, said that the starting point for retailers and brands should be to “dial it back” and to reevaluate what their brand stands for.
“That means that when we run a product promotion or campaign, we can ensure that the strategy is the same across all our channels," she said. "The key for us is clienteling, because ours is a sensorial product and we need to bring our services to the fore, which has been more successful in our stores than it has been online."
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Amner also stressed that traditional channels remain vital to the skincare brand.
“In-store sales staff can offer great service, while for us QVC and home shopping are still big and important channels, and live selling is an evolution of that. But we haven’t cracked it consistently yet, such as on TikTok Shop,” she added.
Lynn Ritson, global digital director at footwear brand Dr. Martens, reflected that choosing a channel strategy was increasingly being driven by consumer behavior.
“The key is understanding the roles of each channel, looking at what they should be like and your legacy [technology] stack and then working out their compatibility,” she said. “We have just launched Buzz [a 1990s-inspired footwear range], and we have worked across all our touchpoints to reach the consumer wherever they want. We particularly see that on ‘live shop’, which is where many of the customers are. I’m not sure many retailers are nailing it at the moment.”
Amanda Hudson, former global head of business transformation at AllSaints, picked up on the same issues and admitted: “I think the journey to seamless retail is one we are all still on; for me it is about achieving consistency wherever the consumer touches the brand.”
As AllSaints is an apparel brand with distinctive store interiors, Hudson noted that the in-store experience with the fashion retailer’s well-informed staff was very strong but that the company has to try to replicate that across the website.
“And with that we do a lot of collaborations with influencers, which has been very successful and something we will continue to grow,” she said. “In the U.S., the situation is a little different, because we have fewer stores and they are located around the edges of the country, so we have to make sure we translate the messages online. The key element for us is to get customer profiles in one place, so we can do more clienteling.”
Looking forward, L’Occitane’s Amner said that she thought immediacy, being able to deliver to even remote locations within 60 minutes, would become very important at driving sales and retention. And, Dr. Martens’ Ritson foresaw physical and virtual working together increasingly, while she predicted that the re-wear and vintage markets would become much bigger.
