#022 : Today on Chill, we’ll be joined by Martyn Boddy of Shopify Plus. A legend in the ecosystem with one of the most strategic minds in the space, Martyn is the Head of Partnerships at Shopify Plus, the fast-growing ecommerce platform taking the world by storm.

Please join us as Overdose’s Director or Global Partnerships Andrew Potkewitz chats with Martyn about growth, tech challenges & successes, market trends, the ecommerce ecosystem, holiday prep, and what we can expect to see in 2021.

#022 : Today on Chill, we’ll be joined by Martyn Boddy of Shopify Plus. A legend in the ecosystem with one of the most strategic minds in the space, Martyn is the Head of Partnerships at Shopify Plus, the fast-growing ecommerce platform taking the world by storm.

Please join us as Overdose’s Director or Global Partnerships Andrew Potkewitz chats with Martyn about growth, tech challenges & successes, market trends, the ecommerce ecosystem, holiday prep, and what we can expect to see in 2021.

#022 : Today on Chill, we’ll be joined by Martyn Boddy of Shopify Plus. A legend in the ecosystem with one of the most strategic minds in the space, Martyn is the Head of Partnerships at Shopify Plus, the fast-growing ecommerce platform taking the world by storm.

Please join us as Overdose’s Director or Global Partnerships Andrew Potkewitz chats with Martyn about growth, tech challenges & successes, market trends, the ecommerce ecosystem, holiday prep, and what we can expect to see in 2021.

#022 : Today on Chill, we’ll be joined by Martyn Boddy of Shopify Plus. A legend in the ecosystem with one of the most strategic minds in the space, Martyn is the Head of Partnerships at Shopify Plus, the fast-growing ecommerce platform taking the world by storm.

Please join us as Overdose’s Director or Global Partnerships Andrew Potkewitz chats with Martyn about growth, tech challenges & successes, market trends, the ecommerce ecosystem, holiday prep, and what we can expect to see in 2021.

#022 : Today on Chill, we’ll be joined by Martyn Boddy of Shopify Plus. A legend in the ecosystem with one of the most strategic minds in the space, Martyn is the Head of Partnerships at Shopify Plus, the fast-growing ecommerce platform taking the world by storm.

Please join us as Overdose’s Director or Global Partnerships Andrew Potkewitz chats with Martyn about growth, tech challenges & successes, market trends, the ecommerce ecosystem, holiday prep, and what we can expect to see in 2021.

#022 : Today on Chill, we’ll be joined by Martyn Boddy of Shopify Plus. A legend in the ecosystem with one of the most strategic minds in the space, Martyn is the Head of Partnerships at Shopify Plus, the fast-growing ecommerce platform taking the world by storm.

Please join us as Overdose’s Director or Global Partnerships Andrew Potkewitz chats with Martyn about growth, tech challenges & successes, market trends, the ecommerce ecosystem, holiday prep, and what we can expect to see in 2021.

#022 : Today on Chill, we’ll be joined by Martyn Boddy of Shopify Plus. A legend in the ecosystem with one of the most strategic minds in the space, Martyn is the Head of Partnerships at Shopify Plus, the fast-growing ecommerce platform taking the world by storm.

Please join us as Overdose’s Director or Global Partnerships Andrew Potkewitz chats with Martyn about growth, tech challenges & successes, market trends, the ecommerce ecosystem, holiday prep, and what we can expect to see in 2021.

Alin tells us it was in his early career when he discovered his passion for marketing. One of his first roles was as customer support for a Danish antivirus company. “I didn’t know it was called marketing back then. So, I was a community manager. I like to understand the customer, to feel their pains and needs and so on and respond to that.” He progressed to the company’s marketing department where he had a great mentor, and where he began to really specialise in marketing.

Then, he moved to Defender, a large antivirus company where he specialised in social media marketing.

Further down the track, his original mentor from the Danish antivirus firm founded a new company, and Alin became his first employee, opening the business’s Romanian office. “That was a very interesting experience because it was a startup. No budgets, making everything from nothing—in Romania there’s a saying, ‘making a horse from a mosquito’. I loved that period, to be honest. It was one of my favourite periods in my profession.”

There, they worked from a coworking space in the city and connected with many in the startup scene. He says he learned the power of connections and the power of the community itself—something he’s taken with him ever since.

After four years, he switched to working for a bigger company in the same industry, a German personal VPN provider called CyberGhost. There, he had the experience of working with big budgets and hyper-growth. “We increased from a couple of million in revenue to tens of millions. So that was a lesson in handling budgets and having hiring sprees and finding the right people in a short time. It was crazy from that perspective.”

Then, after almost 10 years in privacy security, he switched industries. “I went into ecommerce. Why? I don’t know yet. But it’s more fulfilling than I expected, to be honest.”

He landed the role of CMO at Otter to be part of the modernisation phase of the traditional shoe retailer, but, shortly after arriving, he became an integral part of the survival phase.

Covid hit Romania hard just like in any other country. Store closures meant that towards the end of 2020, in-store sales were around 50% of the previous year, and despite an upsurge in the ecommerce channel, it didn’t compensate for the in-store sales drop. Government assistance was provided when stores were closed but ended as soon as stores could open again—yet sales remained down.

“So overall the company has less revenue than last year,” says Alin. “We’re trying to cope with that but still we are not in a bad situation. We are more careful with our spending overall, investing in what matters, trying to maximise the potential of the ecommerce part. We’re trying to play as smart as we can.”

While online has increased its portion of group sales (the ratio of online went from around 20% to around 35%), Alin expects it will grow in the future as they invest more and expand their ecommerce. The ultimate outcome is to increase both online and offline.

Otter is a brand with traditional values, going back to the end of the communist period. There’s a large, loyal customer base who only buy their shoes from Otter. They revere the fact the shoes are Romanian-made—that they are buying quality while sustaining the local economy.

Until a few years ago, the customer was primarily men 40 years and over, and the product offering was solely classic shoes for men. (It’s no surprise men are not the biggest shoe buyers: statistically, 20% or 30% of all purchases are by men and the rest are by women.)

The narrowness of the brand demographic and offering was stymieing growth, so the challenge ahead lay in maintaining existing brand values and keeping the current customer satisfied while moving into new territory and engaging a wider customer base.

They went through a rebranding process: Otter became the name of the group, and the stores were renamed from Otter to Tezyo. The strategy of the Tezyo brand was to target women as well as men. New brands were added to the group: Salamander and Aldo, with Otter holding the franchise and sole distribution rights for the two well-known international brands.

The group grew to 70 stores (around 40 are Tezyo, the remainder are Salamander and Aldo) in small towns and big cities all around the country.

Engaging a younger customer, who often perceives Otter as a shoemaker for men, is an ongoing challenge faced by Otter in its reinvention. “It’s very hard to change their mind,” Alin says. “But it’s something our internal commercial department has done a great job with because we still kept the old shoe style, but have some fancy new trends adapting it. We’re trying to fulfill both targets. All the targets, in fact.”

On one hand, Alin and his team are looking towards the likes of TikTok and Instagram to engage the younger customer, while on the other, it’s about keeping the existing values high. “The data is saying that the 40 plus customers are the most loyal ones. So, we cannot ignore them. We still keep them and try to communicate that we’re still the same Otter. It’s still there, but a bit different.”

A large component of the Otter group of businesses is the franchises Aldo and Salamander. They are single-brand stores which Alin says requires a different marketing strategy to their multi-brand Tezyo stores.

“Under a one-brand store, you focus more on the branding part and trying to position that shoe brand in a way.” In the case of Aldo, they follow a lot of the direction given by the Canadian owners.

“While the multi-brand store is harder,” he says. “It’s very hard to build awareness around the Tezyo brand because it’s not a shoe. There’s no shoe brand with Tezyo—unlike with Aldo, the shoe is tangible, you see it, and you see the brand; it’s Aldo.”

Alin sees the advantages that come from Aldo’s strong brand representation, so he’s been applying that strategy to Tezyo by marketing the shoe brand rather than the store brand itself. This means more focus on the private label (60% of the shoes sold at Tezyo are their own brands: Otter, Flavia Passini, Epica, and others).

The customer conversation becomes about the brand, not the store. “The people are not talking about Tezyo having very nice shoes. They’re saying ‘I love this new Flavia Passini. I’m buying Flavia Passini because I’m loving this shoe brand because they are very comfortable. They have a good price, quality, and so on.’ So, they are finding the values themselves.”

Alin is a believer that you cannot force your way into the mind of the customer. Positioning a brand or a product starts with the customers. “You can amplify. You can get feedback from the customer, like the attributes they associate with the brand—quality, comfort, etc. You can only amplify that. You don’t invent a new attribute like trendy, when Otter is a classic shoe, and try to push that on to the customers while the customer doesn’t resonate with it at all.”

To identify the attributes the customer value, they use a review system and tag clouds segmenting the reviews coming to, for example, the Flavia Passini brand. Then, those attributes people talk about are used in website copy or, say, a TV commercial.

Alin made some sweeping changes when he joined Otter. He says the main channel being used was Remarket. “They had four Remarketing platforms, but there were almost no new acquisition platforms. I cut them off. That was the first thing I did.”

Instead, they started paid advertising with Facebook and Instagram catalogue sales advertising and had phenomenal results. Google Dynamic Ads were subsequently added, leading to another boost in sales. Recently, they’ve added another service, Glami.ro, which Alin says is an affiliate platform providing new customers and new sales at a very low CPA and cost per sale.

Alin explains he chose to focus on paid advertising because it is the ‘the low hanging fruit,’ but his preferred approach is organic marketing. “So next year for us will be all about organic. I think there’s only so much you can grow in paid and usually outbound and inbound marketing work best when you combine them, rather than use one exclusively.”

A lot is happening for Otter in 2021, and beyond. They’re shifting gears: working with Overdose and implementing the following changes:

• Switching platforms from Magento to Shopify Plus
• Changes to the tool stack (including moving from local Romanian providers to international services)
• Focusing on email marketing automation and personalization
• Focusing on SEO
• A new large-scale content marketing project
• International expansion of the ecommerce channel

Alin reiterates the coming year will be about organic marketing, with less focus on paid. “The paid will just be the machine that will provide resources to invest in the rest of the channels.”

After a year of being at Otter, Alin says it’s all starting to make sense. “Now, I have clarity around what ecommerce means and how we should have a success story in ecommerce,” he says. “Let’s see how it goes.”

#022 : Today on Chill, we’ll be joined by Martyn Boddy of Shopify Plus. A legend in the ecosystem with one of the most strategic minds in the space, Martyn is the Head of Partnerships at Shopify Plus, the fast-growing ecommerce platform taking the world by storm.

Please join us as Overdose’s Director or Global Partnerships Andrew Potkewitz chats with Martyn about growth, tech challenges & successes, market trends, the ecommerce ecosystem, holiday prep, and what we can expect to see in 2021.

Dylan launched into his adulthood studying robotics to appease his logical, data-driven mind. But, starting a family at a young age meant he never finished his study; instead his analytical mind ended up in the appliance industry (appliances are machines and so are robots so we can see the segue there).

His career was largely founded during a phase at Fisher & Paykel, an iconic New Zealand­ born-and-bred appliance maker, where he worked on their direct-to-market digital strategy in the UK. A few years later, he was recruited into the Jones Family Business, starting as a Digital Marketing Specialist, before progressing to be the eCommerce and Digital Marketing Manager.

The wider business strategy for the Jones Family Group of Businesses aims to cover the entire customer journey—including retailing, delivering, and servicing. Jones Services is a new entity specifically added to provide a customer service and repairs division, and it was born of an amalgamation of two acquired service businesses. Additionally, the business has an importing arm, Applico, to bring in appliances from all over the world.

With the different business units needing to interact with one another, there’s a lot of data—cue Dylan with his analytical mind—to sift through and interpret in order to best determine how to move business forward and perform well.

2020 marked a new era for Kitchen Things, a coming-of-digital age, which saw the development of digital foundations and a new ecommerce website.

Founder Mark Jones had identified the need for a digital transformation a few years earlier and had started hiring a team to progress the digital journey.

Dylan was one of the key recruits. He says initially they had a false start and their first digital launch didn’t go well for them. Pushed by the owners to reboot and get their ecomm website off the ground, the team engaged Overdose in mid-2019.

Luck was definitely on their side this time around. There was no mirror ball for what was just around the corner when, on the 1^st of March, 2020, the new Kitchen Things digital platform was launched. Covid turned up shortly after, and New Zealand was in lockdown by the month’s end.

The unwittingly timed website launch was Kitchen Things’s first big step in running the digital transformation. But as Dylan puts it, “it was a bad time to shine.”

At the end of March, all of their stores were shut due to lockdown. It was a confusing period initially—no one knew who was allowed to trade and who wasn’t.

So the team just nutted down and used it as an opportunity “to run as hard as we possibly could with our foundational pieces of the digital transformation.” Long 12 to 16-hour workdays during level-four and level-three lockdown periods meant much was accomplished—they developed and deployed a full CRM in three weeks. “While it was extremely difficult, everyone was thankful at that point that we still had jobs. Nobody knew how it was going to pan out.”

The Jones Family Business had spanned over 30 years, and in that time, the owners had jostled a few crises, like the GFC, so they knew how to steady the ship. Dylan explains, “They were really down in the trenches making sure the business survived and thrived, and they made sure everyone was supported.”

An inward look at the business brought them back to focus on the core fundamentals: “What are we doing as a business? How can we keep our customers happy? How can we keep creating? How can we make the most of this situation?”

The early days of the Covid pandemic became a period that really accelerated their overall digital journey.

“In New Zealand,” Dylan says, “there’s a localised need to engage with people—talking to your customers via any media, engaging with them wherever you can.”

With the new ecommerce site launched right when Covid came along, Kitchen Things had, at the ready, the tools to support their customer engagement—chat was activated and business operating hours were extended to support the new era of store-less trading.

The team identified the need to take better care of their customers and hired a Head of Customer Contact to champion the customer service team.

The 2020 strategy to re-engage with the customer included “promotion after promotion after promotion.” With the new digital platform, Kitchen Things ran a brand awareness campaign using messaging to highlight that they are a family-owned business and pushed a call-for-action for consumers to chat with experts. It was a deliberate, targeted approach aimed to communicate reasons why customers should come to Kitchen Things, rather than just shouting out they were on promotion.

When asked what are the significant differences between Kitchen Things and other retailers, Dylan says they work really hard with their suppliers to ensure that they’ve got the best offering. Also, they are focused on the premium end of the market—a different portion than most other retailers.

Kitchen Things uses BigCommerce as their ecommerce SaaS platform. Dylan says it was chosen because it provides a solid foundation for the business to be able to move forward in the digital space.

Selling high-value appliances online is difficult, Dylan explains. “Appliances are large, heavy, boxes—for example, a large, freestanding oven can be a couple of hundred kilos—so the vast majority of them are not courier-able. There’s a logistical challenge to meet customer expectations, especially as customers are used to getting an online purchase within a matter of days.”

The other challenge is major appliances are ‘a touch-and-feel product’—people want to go into the store and see what the oven or fridge looks like. They want to open it, they want to touch it, they want to compare it to others.

There’s a recognition that trading major domestic appliances online requires a very omnichannel approach and so the Kitchen Things online channel is designed to support, or enhance, buying decisions.

“Our business has come out the other side swinging.” Dylan is thrilled that post-lockdown there has been growth in every key metric. He says while it’s no surprise digital growth in New Zealand has been increasing over the last decade, the data for Kitchen Things shows “five years of growth crammed into six months.”

Delving into the data, it shows an increase in people researching online, much higher average engagement on-page, and higher engagement with social media advertising. Dylan says there’s been a big shift, one which is not pedalling off. “It reinforces that New Zealand’s consumer behaviour around digital has changed quite drastically.”

Dylan observes that “customers are walking into a store less but contacting us more via any method—email, chat, phone, engaging on the website or via social media platforms.”

While other businesses may focus just on digital channels, Kitchen Things realises they need to really support getting customers into store and support that store visit as well: “That store visit becomes even more critical to ensure we get it right if they are entering it less,” he explains.

There’s also a noticeable shift in customers making more one-off purchases. Traditionally sales for Kitchen Things were based around purchases of a whole kitchen set-up, say for a new kitchen build or a renovation. But an additional type of buyer has come in: “We have seen a big uplift in customers purchasing one appliance instead of multiple. And that’s a fantastic thing.”

Also, they’ve seen a rise in repeat purchases—significant for ‘big box,’ or large value items, which typically have a longer funnel for repeat business. “We were finding that many people were purchasing, say, a cooktop, and then coming back three months later and purchasing the oven or our small appliances. For example, they would buy the kettle, then they would buy the toaster, and then the mixer.”

Another notable change in consumer behaviour is that a larger demographic of customers is purchasing online.

Dylan says they’ve been really encouraged by the lift in sales from online. “And it’s not just the purchasing, the entire digital space in general. And people will know this from the media consumption over the recent period. It’s been on fire.”

“We need to ensure our digital platform is speaking with the tone the customers expect to see instore, and at the same time, supporting the post-store visit.” Dylan says one of their major digital focuses is on content, “We are concentrating on getting the full range up online with beautiful imagery and associated information.”

Another focus is on supporting their salespeople to become experts through training with the brand, which in turn supports the customer to find the right solution and engage in the buying process.

However, as Dylan says, “In the end, purchasing a large appliance is like buying a car; most people will at least once go and test drive the car and want to sit in it and feel the seats and smell the leather. Then, typically, they’ll engage with one of the platforms for more information and may end up buying it on the platform.”

“We’re going to continue our digital transformation. And that’s not just website but everything associated with it. Also, renewing, changing and enhancing all of our core systems to support our customer focus.”

He says there are plans in the pipeline to continue to merge online and offline, and these are to be rolled out over the next few months.

By the end of Dylan’s discussion, it’s established that Kitchen Things’s business model is very much a holistic, omnichannel approach where the in-store experience complements the digital experience and vice versa. The business really thrives when both work in harmony.

#022 : Today on Chill, we’ll be joined by Martyn Boddy of Shopify Plus. A legend in the ecosystem with one of the most strategic minds in the space, Martyn is the Head of Partnerships at Shopify Plus, the fast-growing ecommerce platform taking the world by storm.

Please join us as Overdose’s Director or Global Partnerships Andrew Potkewitz chats with Martyn about growth, tech challenges & successes, market trends, the ecommerce ecosystem, holiday prep, and what we can expect to see in 2021.

Alicia joined JackThreads in 2010. At the time, they were a flash-sale site for men’s fashion with a membership community channelled through social media.

These were Alicia’s formative years; she moved across nearly all facets of the business starting in the Accounts Payable department, moving to Fulfilment & Operations, then becoming the Director of Merchandising Operations, followed by Senior Director of Programming.

She was clearly good at managing people and processes. Or ‘organising,’ as Alicia modestly calls it. “I just generally knew I was good at organising things and wanted to work for a company that I saw going in a different, newer direction. So, that’s why I was so gung-ho on JackThreads in the beginning. It was super exciting—we were a really young, small, scrappy team.”

In 2016, Alicia joined watch and accessory maker MVMT, another bold brand that initially set out to deliberately disrupt the fashion industry by being a progressive, crowdfunded, ‘community brand,’ with a massive 1.5 million owners. It was an exciting time—they were one of the first big brands to roll out shoppable Instagram feeds.

Alicia’s focus initially was on developing a close partnership with the burgeoning Shopify Plus, before broadening to the wider tech stack, “basically bringing to life everything the marketing team wanted to do.”  She recalls they had crazy ideas. Their motto, ‘move fast and break things,’ was potentially a risky modus operandi which could have easily backfired. It was a time when there was a lot of quick learning, but it all seemed to work.

In mid-2020, Alicia joined 11 Honoré, a fashion e-tailer catering to the plus-size customer in a luxury market. Inclusivity and anti-sizeism were the mission of its influential entrepreneurial founder, Patrick Herning, who has ultimately become a red-carpet hero. By joining forces with high-end brands such as Zac Posen, Oscar de la Renta, and Christian Siriano, who extended their size range to include plus sizes, the 11 Honoré concept couldn’t have represented the tenet of inclusivity more assertively.

“In a fashion,” says Alicia, “it’s a movement—a shift in the perception of plus, and there’s much psychology behind it. We talk about it all the time and we really look at how we can resonate with the consumer and build a community.”

Discussion inevitably turns to the pandemic and the effect it’s having on 11 Honoré. Prior to Covid, their mainstay was event-wear; around 60 percent of business was “$5,000 dresses for events, galas, all of that fun stuff that didn’t happen this year or last year.”

The microscope came out to look over the business to see what could be done. “I feel like it was a reimagining of everything. It was tough, but it was really healthy in the long run.” Learnings from purchasing shifts were incorporated into new collections. For example, more separates and a bodysuit were introduced, and they’ve been selling really well.

Furthering the mission to generate a new movement for inclusivity in fashion and beauty, Patrick Herning went on to create Thirteen Lune, a make-up and beauty ecommerce destination celebrating Black and Brown brands.

Patrick started working with co-founder Nyakio Grieco during Covid, deciding, “Let’s just get everybody we know on board and do it again.” Alicia was brought on as Head of eCommerce. “It was tough starting a business on Zoom,” she says, “but it happened.”

Alicia has been at the forefront of another retail inclusivity concept, City Shoppe, aimed at bringing local small businesses into a broader market. She’s been working with the founder to get it off the ground. “There’s still a ton of work to do, but it’s an awesome concept—so many businesses don’t have the marketing dollars to put behind acquisition or the money to build a storefront and ecommerce site, so they don’t really have anywhere to go. There’s obviously Amazon. There’s obviously Etsy. They’re slightly different markets, so this is really just to spotlight cities and the best local shopping in the city. I would say we’re still in super beta mode, but it’s exciting.”

Alicia talks of the polarisation of the online marketplace. There’s people that love Amazon and shop on it all the time because it’s so convenient and has such a large catalogue, but, on the other hand, there’s a growing base of people who don’t want to see the uniqueness of their cities or their streets go away, and are rethinking where they’re spending their dollar.

She thinks it will take a few years to see how things evolve. “It’s got to stabilize a little bit and hopefully swing a little bit back in the other direction of smaller is better, quality is better.”

And people are really starting to care about the brands they engage with. They want to know a brand has values and a conscience and there are actual people behind the brand—it’s not just some faceless, nameless brand that has a logo.

There’s a point when brand awareness becomes a nuisance­­­­­—when people start getting turned off by it instead of just ignoring it.

11 Honoré is working with Overdose on a Customer Data Platform, or CDP—a move Alicia feels is crucial moving forward. “People are tired of, and turned-off by, marketing. There’s a lot of banner blindness—where you might have hit them with a Facebook ad and Instagram ad, or they get an email, and it’s good as a reminder, but they’re not truly engaging. It’s more of just a notification because they’re getting so many other things from all over the place.”

In a world of millions of customer touchpoints and interactions, CDPs build customer profiles by integrating data from a variety of first-, second-, and third-party sources including CRM and DMP, transactional systems, web forms, email and social media activity, website and e-commerce behavioural data, and more.

 CDPs provide a way for an organisation to get acquainted with each and every individual. It’s customer-centred marketing where businesses have more accurate and effective data to manage their customer relationships and really just get to know their customers better.

There is strength in the ecosystem—alliances can be a very powerful thing, and Alicia seems to have a really collaborative mindset, often focusing on the partner ecosystem in her growth strategies.

“A massive discovery for myself is that I like bridging across things, and being more of that connector within the teams and with the outside ecosystem.”

Some of the partners Alicia currently works with are:

Klarna

Klarna and the whole buy-now-pay-later industry has been a boon for retail with millions of merchants offering customers a pay-overtime option. Alicia works with Klarna for 11 Honoré and Thirteen Lune.

Gorgias

A customer service platform or helpdesk which engages customers through meaningful and profitable interactions; a way for ‘merchants to leverage support into growth.’

Yotpo

“I love Yotpo,” Alicia says of the platform that manages customer reviews, loyalty, referrals, and SMS marketing.

Overdose

In terms of the merchant-agent relationship, Alicia views the agency as an extension of the team, “It works really well when you think about it that way. You make each other better. I see it as fractional support.”

Alicia’s collaborator mindset—where a true partnership is one in which you either both succeed or you both fail.

With someone like Alicia client-side, it’s hard not to feel that things are going to succeed.

#022 : Today on Chill, we’ll be joined by Martyn Boddy of Shopify Plus. A legend in the ecosystem with one of the most strategic minds in the space, Martyn is the Head of Partnerships at Shopify Plus, the fast-growing ecommerce platform taking the world by storm.

Please join us as Overdose’s Director or Global Partnerships Andrew Potkewitz chats with Martyn about growth, tech challenges & successes, market trends, the ecommerce ecosystem, holiday prep, and what we can expect to see in 2021.