"Expressive" Luxury Meets Analytics: Tapestry's Pooja Chandiramani and Avinash Kaushik on Marketing Transformation

Welcome to an all-new season of the Conversations with Commerce Next podcast. We were thrilled to partner with Steve Dennis and Michael LeBlanc from the industry-leading Remarkable Retail Podcast to record interviews with several of our speakers at this year's growth show in New York City for both our podcast and here on Conversations with Commerce Next. Commerce Next has a sterling reputation in the retail industry for presenting best in class retail thought leaders at the growth show.

So Steve and I were excited to interview some of the remarkable retailers and retail industry insiders in our remote podcast studio at the show. In our final summer bonus episode, we sit down with two remarkable leaders, shaping tapestry future, Punja Chetamarani, who helps drive marketing analytics and transformation for the holding company that owns Coach and Kate Spade, and Avinash Kashuk, bestselling author and digital marketing pioneer. Together, they share how the multi-billion dollar global fashion power is driving brand transformation through analytics, creative pre-testing, and cultural alignment.

They also reveal how expressive luxury, intent-centric marketing, and AI are shaping the future of consumer connections. Poonjen Avanish, welcome to Remarkable Retail Podcast here at Commerce Next in New York City. How are you both doing? Great.

It's fantastic to have you both on the mic. Listen, it's been a great day. Temperatures are on our side for staying in a nice hotel and hanging out at a great conference. So, well, listen, I know a little bit about both of you, but let's share that with the listeners.

First, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do for a living. Sure. So, I'm Pooja Chandiramani. I lead marketing, analytics, brand transformation, global media strategy, and planning at Coach, which is part of Tapestry.

Fantastic. How do you get all that in a business card? My goodness, that's a big remit. Besides fault out.

I'm crowdsourcing a new title. Let's chat GPT. So we're going to ask you this question a little bit later about understanding, so that all the listeners understand Tapestry and the brands underneath. So you work on the Coach brand or all the Tapestry brands?

No, I work on the Coach brand, which is part of Tapestry. And you would have similar counterparts in each of the brands, and you'd come together to figure the same things out in a meeting of the minds. Okay, just so I kind of get what you do. Now, you're a bit of a legend in the marketing area, but you're now working with Coach.

But tell us about yourself initially. Yes. So I work at Tapestry, which is the home of Coach Kate Spade and Stuart Wiseman. Okay, gotcha.

And I work with our CFO, Scott Rowe, and our president of international, Sandeep, sat on global brand transformation. Okay. And prior to that, I still run an agency. Prior to that, I spent 16 years at Google.

You've written some books too, right? Yes, two best-selling books. I tell people I'm famous. I mean, you've made your name in the trade, so if I can frame it that way, in understanding analytics, and it's not just understanding search, but it's a broader kind of background of that, the kind of things you bring to your clients and that you're bringing to Tapestry, right?

It's just more, would you describe it as, I will help you understand the meaning of analytics? I don't want to put words in your mouth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, at the very core of what we do at Tapestry is intent-centric marketing.

That's at the very core. We don't want to just shove people down funnels that don't exist. But we take a very customer into company view. So as we do intent-centric marketing around the world with our brands, a lot of that work is led, of course, by Pooja for Coach.

We use data to be more agile, more nimble, more informed. We use AI to go smarter, faster. So it's the underlying thing that enables the outcome we want, which is intent-centric marketing. So before, we want to get into all that, but just to make sure people are tracking.

If they aren't, I mean, I'm sure many in our audience will be familiar with Tapestry and the brands underneath. But Pooja, maybe could you just give us a quick overview of what Tapestry is and then a little bit more just so people kind of understand the consumer and competitive environment you're doing all this work in. So Tapestry is a house of fashion brands, and it has Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman. And if you are familiar with these brands, they are all North America brands.

And Coach is a brand that is 80-plus years old. It's a global fashion brand rooted in heritage and craftsmanship. And Kate Spade is about 40-plus years old now and has a very different brand DNA than Coach, but both lead in handbags category. Right.

And do you like the moniker accessible luxury or not so much? Expressive. Expressive luxury. Expressive but not so expensive.

I think we moved away from talking about price value as like associating that. Right. It's kind of an old way of distribution. It's an old way of thinking.

It's more of the values we present as a brand. And that's where we evolved our strategy a few years ago and said it is all rooted in our values. and we also recognize as we are going and targeting a much younger consumers, they want to connect with brand more in an authentic way. And the only way you can do that is if you talk about your values and that's where expressive luxury came into play.

More understanding consumer insights and how they believe in luxuries no longer your traditional luxury. It's more of how you express yourself and coach gives you that platform. I like that let's talk about strategic analytics and you know analytics digital transformation they not new in retail I mean Steve and I we were talking about those things 20 30 years ago So at what point are we at in the clock in terms of how strategic analytics the role that they playing and is that role different I mean, you both have rich careers in doing this.

I'm sure sometimes it's evangelizing, sometimes it's kind of course correcting, but sometimes it's setting the course. So, Pujit, start us off. How do you think about anchoring analytics in the brand strategy? You're obviously very versed in the strategy of the brand.

What role does it play, and have we moved that role farther and faster in retail these days? I would say I can speak for Coach. We have been on a transformation journey, so it's not an incremental change we've made with analytics. It's really transforming the brand using analytics.

And the way I look at analytics is analytics drives insights that ultimately drives actions and provides business impact. And we have made analytics as like a key pillar and an enabler to grow our brand and transform our brand. So if we're in a baseball game, what inning are we in in the world of analytics doing this kind of advanced strategic planning role in retailers? I mean, you've been, I think I used the word evangelizing before, but you've been talking about this for most of your career.

Is it sticking now? Is tapestry an outlier? Are they leading the way? Are there fast followers behind you?

Talk about your context for that. Yeah. So obviously tapestry is the best in the world. We call that a softball in the podcasting world?

That's how you made it through the screen. If you're not the best in the world, you're not on this podcast. So our listeners would know that. I am really proud of the transformation we have accomplished over the last four years under the stewardship of Sandeep, who used to be our CMO at Coach and is now the president of Tapestry International.

He sort of started the ball rolling in truly thinking about analytics as something that builds a competitive advantage. So the way we think about it at Tapestry is every retail brand, lots of retail brands, our competitors, spend tons of money on brand marketing. Most of it tends to be based on faith. Trust me, it's going to work.

50% works. We just don't know which 50%. Exactly. But at Tapestry, we have a very clear, focused playbook that uses some of the most advanced analytics to reduce the amount of faith as we make decisions for tens of millions of dollars in marketing.

and increase the amount of influence data can bring to it. So, Pooja and I, if we're having a discussion around coach, can go to our CFO, Alex, who's absolutely awesome, and actually help him understand what is the true incrementality of brand marketing. It's one of the hardest questions in marketing to answer, is that if we lift an idiot brand awareness by two points, can we expect $100 million of revenue six months from now, or is it five? that's a super difficult question for most retail brands to answer but it's something that we've started to do routinely at Tapestry we're not where we want it to be I want us to be even faster and more insight driven but I'm really amazed that we can go to our CFO and have a discussion over brand marketing of course when it comes to performance marketing it's a little easier question to answer we can do large scale experiments we have these machine learning algorithms You've got A-B testing, regimes, all those things.

But the fact that on brand, we can bring data to bear with the lens of incrementality is something that has helped us build a competitive advantage at Tapestry across our brands. So I've got just one quick follow-up about the enablers for that. So I was doing analytics 20, 30 years ago, and it was hard, right? I mean, we didn't have cloud computing.

We didn't have a lot of the advanced technology. Has that really been an enabler? or has that been a game changer in the world of analytics, both philosophically but also the capabilities to crunch even bigger data with more precision? So, you know, like I am an author of best-selling books in 12 languages about data, and one thing I have come to appreciate in my career is culture is more important than data.

That's why I mentioned sort of Sandeep's name or Scott Rowe, our global CFO. like they bring a particular cultural vision to bear that allows data to speak up and do the things that it can do. That's the thing that's missing in lots of company cultures. At Google, I worked with the top 100 companies on the planet.

Everything you can imagine, travel, insurance, retail, anything in between. And I find that you need to create the cultural headspace in a company where you have a welcome for data, a welcome for bad results that data identifies. And the belief in the data, too, right? Yes.

The belief in, is that really, are you telling me I didn't make any money in all that work? I know. Or I made this much money in all that work? Exactly.

Like that A, B, it's hard to believe. So I remember one of the stories from our CFO, Alex, early on in this journey that Sandeep was taking us on. For the first six, nine months, the results were bad. And yet there was this belief that, no, no, we're going to keep trying.

We have this really solid foundation of data, and we're going to keep going before we pull the plug on anything strategic that we believe in. That culture, I want to emphasize, its criticality more than cloud compute. Now, the fact that in that culture, we now have access to more sophisticated algorithms. We can use AI in very creative ways.

And the fact that we have, in Pooja's team, staffed a team of human beings who can have access to all this extraordinary horsepower. That definitely, definitely accelerates the journey. But culture before data. Yes.

So talk a little bit more because Michael mentioned, I mean, I remember when I was on the leadership team at Neiman Marcus. I think I had a slide for the board that started out in God we trust all others bring data right Which is a very cliche comment right But you know and there been competing on analytics Like there have been so many of these concepts that have been out there for such a long time. And I would say people very interested in leveraging customer insight, all these things.

I mean, how many presentations have we been to for years where this is talked about? So yes, the tools are better, but what I'm interested in is how maybe you can talk a little bit about your journey at Coach, because I know you worked on other transformation things. What's the unlock in getting the culture to change? Or is it just kind of getting lucky?

Like I found sometimes in my career as a consultant as well as a leadership team, you kind of get lucky because you do get an executive who's got a bias towards a certain size and that gives you that momentum. But there's got to be more to that, particularly in a complex of organization going from these ideas and just saying, hey, look, look at all these cool new technologies. Now we can really do the one-to-one future 30 years after the book came out. So what is it that has really driven that change?

I would say, adding on to what Avinash was saying, I have done enough transformations in my life, and good and bad. And what I've noticed that works really well is when you have the right sponsorship and the belief system at the leadership level, where you have sponsors who believe in what you're doing, The second thing I would say is sometimes we overcomplicate things. So what has been really helpful having Avinash as our strategic advisor the last few years, we have been able to unlock those things by making it much, much more simplified.

We have set right frameworks and right off the bat, set the right expectations with the team. I use Avinash's quote that he says, and we use it all the time, don't judge the fish by its ability to climb a tree. And that is actually very impactful for us because a lot of times when you're doing brand building, active marketing, you cannot go back and say, why didn't my sales turn around immediately? And I think that's where it's not only important to have that sponsorship, the right frameworks of how you measure things, but also making sure that you set the right expectations within your leadership to what should be the outcome of a marketing campaign you're running.

So those things sound very simple, but when put together can be really powerful in unlocking a change. We'll be right back with Poonja from Coach and Avanish from Tapestry right after these messages. Promotional support for the Remarkable Retail podcast is provided by Crave Retail. What's retail's biggest blind spot?

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To get a jump on the competition, join the waitlist today at findmind.com slash remarkable retail. Dale. And have you one thing I'm interested, I guess, from a leadership standpoint is and I don't know that I can.

I guess I'm trying to think about I've oftentimes seen people use fear as the motivator that like, you know, this things are changing very quickly. You will get left behind or the competition is doing this. And if we don't act and take these bold steps, we're going to be out of business or we'll be in the zone of irrelevance, as I often phrase it. other people more hope.

But, you know, is there something, I don't know if that even makes sense as a question. It does, it does. I think that our senior leader, our CEO, Joanne, very inspiring CEO, she has set sort of internal, optimistic, forward-looking vision. We would like to be X amount of revenue in Y years.

And that's a very, very stretched, difficult goal to accomplish. But what she's sort of so great at, what Todd, our inspiring CEO of Coach, is great at is translating that back to saying, this is like a fun, exciting, difficult thing we're going to go on. And you know what? We might fall a little short of X or Y.

That's not the point. The point is to try to get there. And then Pooja's job and my job is to make sure that that hope, that that audacity is matched by fundamental change in the business across teams. It's a really hard thing to pull off.

So one of the things that we emphasize together for our brand Kate Spade and Coach where we spend most of our time is you know what as we plan our marketing we going to focus on outcomes planning versus activity planning Most companies, most agencies do activity-based planning. And so now you have this hope from our global CEO, Joanne. It's like, hey, we're going to go to this really far thing. And what we've done is translated into this real practical thing that we can implement across 15 countries that allow us to make rapid progress there, or the way we use AI.

It's really important that those two things have to meet. Sometimes what happens is you have all of these incredible measurement platforms or marketing activation tactics that are available inside the team. There's no hope or vision that allows them to flower. Other times you have this hope and vision, and there's no ability to figure out how to find all these tactics that allow you to scale.

And I think what is really helpful for us, and we still have a long journey to go at a tapestry, is these two things come together, allow us to do something that builds a competitive advantage. Sure. So I'm mindful of our time, and there's a lot we could get into, but I'm curious in terms of what you're planning to stay on stage, because we're catching you just before you guys are going to chat. For the benefit of our audience, are there any particular areas, I mean, it's convenient to talk about AI, maybe something else, But are there a few particular areas that you're really pushing on or have found success that might not be so obvious to?

And we have a very diverse audience. I know it's probably hard to think. But anything that you're planning to talk about or go like, you really, this is an interesting area to explore, a rich area to develop? I would say the one area that is critical and we don't talk too much about it is creative fee testing.

And Avina says, win before you spend. I'm staying away from AI, as you said, AI. Of course, we are talking about AI. But the thing that was an unlock for us is like we all, you treat your creatives as your children.

Everybody is beautiful. But actually letting your audience vote for it and tell you what worked, what did not work. But rooted in data, rooted in the metrics we need to drive eventually with our campaigns. and understanding that and actually making some hard choices and then making sure you're putting your media dollars behind the right one is something that I don't know how many companies adopt that.

It's very cultural. It's very cultural. I thought that creative would work. It didn't work.

The data's wrong. Yeah. Kind of fighting that, right? Exactly.

Exactly. So that's like one of the things that we would be talking about, and I don't know if audiences have an appreciation for creative pre-testing. Because a creative is responsible for 60% to 70% of the impact of all of your marketing. Just a piece of creative.

A little thing in the display ad, a little six-second pre-roll you run on YouTube, or a 30-second ad you run on TV, or the billboard that you see outside this building. That's responsible for 60% to 70% of success. So it's a tapestry. We use a company called Human-Based Machine, and it allows us to test that creative before we spend money against our intended target audience.

So our CMO may think that our creative is a gift to humanity. But is that true? And this is where those two things come together. One is our CMO, June Silverstein, who's one of the most visionary creative people that I've worked with in my life.

She's extraordinary. Huja and I can go to June and say, this is a great creative. We've built a new stewardship. We're now going to test it with real people.

It's a difficult thing. But the fact that we can go out, find 300 people in test, 300 people in control, expose the creative to them in the real environment, and be able to predict the likelihood that it will win in the real world. Sometimes we get results that June may be excited about our CMO. Other times maybe not.

but the fact that we build this engine allows us to be really strong. Sure. Just really quickly, though, in terms of what you're measuring, is it intent to purchase? Is it brand affinity?

What are the kinds of things that you're really measuring in those tests? We have two simple things. As Pooja said, we've dramatically simplified what we do. So at the end of the day, all marketing, as we think in annual investment terms, has to drive incremental revenue, and we measure cost for incremental sales driven by marketing.

Just two. Both based on incrementality. Not attribution, not all that crap. Two things.

Second, for our brand marketing, because we're a brand-led business, we use two simple metrics and we solve for a KPI called uneated brand awareness. The hardest one to solve. Uneated brand awareness. And we measure the number of people lifted and cost for individuals lifted.

You see the cousins on both sides. At the end of the day, when we go meet our CFO, Alex, that's what we're taking to do as proof that marketing has an incremental impact on the business. And then we ask for tens of millions of more dollars. Well, at least you have some evidence, right?

Well, this has been terrific. I know you guys got a run. We're really so grateful we were able to catch you here at Commerce Next. And a lot more, I'm sure we could learn from you, but we're grateful we got you for 15 or 20 minutes today.

So thanks for joining Michael and myself on the Remarkable Retail Podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thanks for listening.

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