Powering Retail Transformation: River Island, Nobel Panacea & Pentland Brands

Well, welcome to season 10 of the award-winning Retail Tea Break podcast. My name is Melissa Moore, The Retail Advisor. I'm a retail educator, trainer and retail conference MC, and each week as your host, I'll be joined by industry experts, retailers, and brands to dispel the myths, share their knowledge and give you an insight into the retail industry. There's well over a hundred episodes now for you to listen back to on your favorite podcast platform.

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So subscribe to the Retail Tea Break podcast on Substack today. In the meantime, then grab a cup of tea, sit back, and enjoy season 10 of the glorious Retail Tea Break podcast. This episode of the Retail Tea Break podcast was recorded live at the fabulous press event for this year's Retail Technology Show. It's on at London's ExCeL on the 22nd of the 23rd of April, and registration is now open.

The episode is brought to you by SmartGifty, the modular digital platform connecting gift cards, loyalty and data into one experience. And founder Jurij Triller will be at the Retail Technology Show, connect to him directly on LinkedIn and arrange your meeting today. So I'm joined by Meriel Neighbour, Director of Technology at River Island. Delighted to have you on the Retail Tea Break Podcast.

Tell us a bit about you and your background in the industry. So I think if you cut me in two, I would say transformation. That's what I love. I love the pressure about it and spinning all the plates all the time, and delivering stuff.

Ultimately it's about what you deliver and the customer experience is center to my heart in, in everything that I do. And customers are obviously not just external customers, they're also your internal customers. But in terms of my background, I'm currently, as you say, at River Island. We are undertaking a transformation right now.

And prior to that, some other major iconic British brands, so directly before with Boots. Directly before that, Clarks. Wow. Directly before that Ted Baker, Selfridges, and I can go on.

And I come in, do the whole end-to-end piece in terms of understanding requirements, what the problems are, what needs to be resolved, going and sourcing the technology that will enable it, building the teams, taking people on the journey and delivering those outcomes and their success. Just like that. You make it sound so straightforward and so easy, and I'm sure it was everything but. So on that then, as you mentioned River Island, obviously in the middle of a major digital transformation.

What's made the biggest difference so far in what you're doing? We are right at the sort of development stage of the journey. So the biggest difference is the fact that having been through some troubling times with River Island over the past sort of 18 months, we are now coming out the other side. And it's not just about the transformation from a technology point of view, it's also about what we do with our products, how we get our products, the whole ethos of the customers that we are trying to go after, what our brand stands for, how we are going to service those customers with the products that we are designing and buying.

And the technology is just one part of that overall story. Where we are at this moment in time, we've obviously done our discovery. We selected the tools that we're going to put in place, and this is part of a strategy that probably stretches over the next three to five years because we can't do everything at once. That's too much change, not just for our customers, but our internal customers and our business.

People getting their heads around the tooling and the changes and the, the processes that are going to adapt. And obviously the advent of AI coming in and all of that, that plays into it. To do everything at the same time, as much as you could do that with obviously an enormous team, you can't do that from a practical point of view. So we are on e-commerce, digital re platform, with a PIM 'cause there's lots of manual work, like lots of retailers out in the big wide world.

And we want to streamline and automate some of that and obviously put AI in where we can. And then a really good search and merchandising tool as well. And that will be that first enabling stage. And then we'll go on to OMS, PLM, potentially POS, et cetera, et cetera.

So there is a, a journey to be had. And it sounds like not only is it touching everyone in the company, but obviously literally company wide as in departmental right across what you're doing, no wonder it's such a long journey because I actually think a lot of people think, right, you, you flick a switch, bang, here we go, everyone's happy. Different transformations take different time depending on the complexity and not just what tooling you are buying and putting in place, but what you've got in your backend.

Over years retailers have sweated and sweated their assets and we've stuck sticky plaster on sticky plaster, and it gets to that point where you've got to suddenly go enough is enough. And the complexity usually lies in that backend piece in terms of making sure that it's going to be efficient and performant with all the front end new technology that you're putting in place. So that's probably the challenge that elongates some transformations. In terms of what we are doing, yes, we have some of that old legacy stack that we've got to get rid of and become more composable and more agile in, in our technology.

But the front end piece is actually quite quick and quite dynamic. But it's then the pace of change and being able to get the business alongside their BAU because you can't just stop doing what you are doing in existing world. Life goes on, retail goes on, you've still gotta make money while you're going through that transition. So it's running both in parallel and that sometimes can cause some of the challenges or length of time.

In terms of your flicking the switch, you can do that. So at Go Live itself, Wow you can literally just flick a switch depending how you build it. It can be that easy. The hard work's done.

Yeah. And you can get to that absolute flick from one to the other. And just press a button. So it can be easier at that stage after all the hard work.

After all the hard work. I love that. Can we talk then about MACH principles? It's something I think people dance around, maybe, not necessarily understanding it unless they've lived it like you.

So for those listening, what is it? And obviously more important, what's it delivering or what's it helping you do? So as I say, a lot of historically, a lot of retailers and other industries as well, we've built these monolithic, architectural designs and platforms where everything is disjointed. Sometimes in silos.

So you have a platform that delivers point of sale, a platform that delivers CRM, a platform that delivers e-commerce, et cetera, et cetera. And the MACH side of composability means that you can plug all of those in at the same time so that you can all sing and dance to one another. And if you talk about the holy grail of retail in terms of that unified journey from a customer point of view, so that you can start and stop your journey wherever, however, at the convenience of you.

Composable allows you to do that because you can just plug and play and switch and you can easily enabled your journey in social commerce to carry on in web commerce, to carry on on app commerce, to carry on in retail commerce. So you can just join that whole journey. As far as what it stands for. M; Microservices.

So that's how we build stuff, in terms of the ease of microservices, what they are. A; API first. So that means the connection, the integrations are all built along APIs. Gone are the days our batch integrations.

So you can do everything dynamically and you can do everything in real time, which enables you to service that customer at the drop of a hat, and at the end of their fingertips really, really quickly. C; Composable. And cloud native, so everything's in the cloud. Yeah.

So lots of SaaS products is what builds up the composability and those plug and play. And H; Headless. So that's the what builds your storefront. Your front end is the ease and the flexibility of being able to drag and drop and create and build and video content and influencer content and just bring it all in and bring everything to life, and is less fixed so it's more agile so that you can keep changing and keep it up to date and keep it modern and keep it, really relevant to your customers as well.

So those are the four underlying principles of the MACH Alliance, but it enables absolutely that flexibility and the agile nature so that we know out in the big wide world what a customer experience is required changes at the drop of a hat. One day it's this is important. The next day it's that is important and that composable nature of a MACH Alliance, if you build that, that architecture, it means that you can have that agility and you can literally put your next release out, whatever those changes are, day in, day out, it's out there.

No downtime. So gone are the days where you have to switch everything off, land everything, switch it all on, test it again, make sure it comes up and it's working and no gremlins have got in place and you lose all your trade during that period of downtime. With MACH principles put in place in that MACH architecture, you can release on an ongoing basis, day in, day out, even multiple releases per day, and you can just be of the moment right there. It sounds exactly where we need to be for retail.

Seamless for the customer. Easier in some respects for the company, 'cause again, you know, it's going to happen seamlessly for that customer. It absolutely sounds like where everyone needs to be right now, which is amazing. So, look, last question then.

You've obviously worked for some incredible retailers, you, you've mentioned them there. From your perspective then, why do some digital or tech transformation programs, I suppose, pick up speed, build momentum, not in the length of time it takes to deliver, but obviously the fact that they, they hit the ground running. Internal, external customers are happy. And then the opposite, why maybe a sum fractured, even as they build?

Sometimes it's about investment. If you're going to go through a whole transformation back end, front end and all of the above, that A; takes time, but B; it costs a lot of money. Yeah. Still in this day and age.

AI will help some of that because AI can take out some of those processes that were modern a couple of years ago, but now are going to be augmented by the use of AI. But 1; it's about time. It's about capacity of change. So how much can businesses take on at the same time and their customers as well?

Because if you change everything from a customer, they don't know whether they're coming or going. Yeah. And what's right, what's wrong? What do I do?

And again, it depends whether within every retailer it's different, but some of them will carry risks. So sometimes the work that's gotta be done first is to get rid of that risk. Bits of systems that are going to literally come to end of life and support. And that, I've dealt with that mm-hmm where you've had a fixed deadline and you can't do anything about it and you have to deliver, otherwise you just stop trading.

So some of that gets involved. Some of it is about capacity within the business for all of that change and being able to cope with it all. Some of it is just the fact that we have sweated our assets because retail is going through a hard time. Yeah.

It's been going through a hard time and it doesn't matter what part of retail, if you online apps, stores, whatever. And so therefore we've got to make a little money to be able to spend a little money. Yeah. But that change will happen.

And it's prioritizing, always prioritizing, where are you gonna get the biggest bang for your buck? And everybody within the business wants something. So you've always got that contention and competition. So your buying and merchandising director wants something in their world.

Your technology director wants something in their world. WMS and DC's, we need to modernize because one of the experience elements that, certainly the generations moving through now in terms of shopping, want everything at their fingertips, whether it be a delivery or a return. And our DC's aren't necessarily and but they're costly, yeah to actually put, right. So there's always competition about where you're gonna spend, what you're gonna spend on, and how quickly you can deliver it all.

But very exciting times. It is indeed. Oh, well, listen, thank you for your time today. So many insights there, and again from your incredible background in the industry.

Delighted to talk to you today, Meriel. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Thank you.

So, Will Lockie, Global Digital Director at Noble Panacea, welcome to the Retail Tea Break podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Lovely to meet you again.

Again. I know. It's fantastic. Well look, for those that don't know you, tell us a little bit about you and your background in the industry.

Yep. So currently digital director at Nobel Panacea, a luxury skincare brand selling across the world. Prior to that, sort of 20 years experience in UK multi-brand retail, luxury mono brands, jewellery, homeware, sold most things in my e-com career, like a lot of us, and still loving the challenge. That's good to hear.

We've obviously been here this morning setting up or kind of looking forward towards The Retail Technology Show and of course AI has come up 'cause it's still coming up everywhere. As it's becoming more embedded in retail and obviously e-commerce, how are you seeing loyalty programs specifically kind of evolving beyond just like the discounts that we're all used to? Yeah. Beyond the earn and burn.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's become. A little bit passe now, and, and because the technology is so ubiquitous, it's become prevalent. So everybody's thinking, I need to get a loyalty program, of course.

Okay. How does AI play into that? I think my comment on that would be, be very, very careful about your customer data, right? And what data is going where, especially in regards to loyalty given customer data's so valuable.

So safeguarding around, particularly, even for employees, what data is going where is sort of one observation of what's happening at the moment. I think that, one of the things we are very focused on is just owning that customer data and making sure we are making the best use of it ourselves as opposed to it being with a third party. So that's the other sort of area of focus. The third thing is probably less to do with loyalty, but the cost to entry and the low cost to testing with some of these tools is actually quite empowering for retailers and, and people like me.

And you heard earlier on the panel, we can go and, you know, use some agents to just test out our storefront or run some testing so quickly and at low cost, whereas before it would be a human being doing that testing. And I think that for us is the bigger benefit to free us up to spend more of our time on the things that really matter, like developing a loyalty program that has service at the heart or a one-to-one, relationship with the customer. That's fascinating to see. And actually, so fundamentally, AI aside, whether it's loyalty programs or just pure old fashioned retail, it's gotta be the emotion.

It's gotta be the customer first. It can't be tech driven. It's got to be suiting their needs before actually we start building out anything else. Yeah, a hundred percent.

There's a good buzz phrase at the moment, quiet tech. Yeah. Like, you shouldn't really, it should be unintrusive. I think, you know, whether it's, whether you're online or offline.

There's always, you know, what it enables is a level of insight intervention in real time, is gonna be particularly powerful, in a non-creepy way. I think that's the, the key part there. And also just given all privacy data, et cetera, given your market and where you're at. So you've got all of those kind of things to take into account.

But it's super interesting. There's a lot, there's so much happening out there that can be done quickly. Speed to market so much quicker. Yeah, it's fascinating.

Watch this space! Shopper expectations, I suppose, as well as the tech have changed dramatically. Mm-hmm. Especially over the last five, six years.

We won't mention the C word. For you then, what does modern loyalty strategy look like? You know, tech or no tech, and how do we need to deliver it today that might have been different to what came before? Hmm.

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think that, I was talking to somebody earlier and I think the, firstly like, don't tech for tech's sake and over digitizing, over solutioning, over engineering, or however you wanna call it. Avoid that at all costs. Mm-hmm.

And think about what really matters to your customer. And normally that is gonna be some areas around service trust, product. So you mentioned strategy. Probably the number one piece of advice is figure out for you as a brand, what it is that your customers value about you.

And then design your program, your approach around that. Makes perfect sense. ' cause it will resonate basically. So it is, it's that long term thing of whether it's tech or loyalty or anything in between.

It's those fundamental retail values of knowing and understanding the customer and keeping them here long term. A hundred percent brilliant at the basics. And on that note, Will, delighted that you can join me this morning. Thanks so much for your time.

Oh, you're welcome. Good to see you. Delighted to be joined now by Ana Machado da Silva, the VP Digital Product at Pentland Brands. Thrilled to have you on the Retail Tea Break podcast.

Thank you very much for having me. Thank you. So look, I suppose, tell us a little bit about your background in the industry to kick us off. Alright, so, very, very early on I loved the internet and my first proper job was probably in an email marketing company when email was new.

But then I wanted to go client side or brand side. So my first brand was ASOS which I loved ASOS because at the time it, websites didn't really, e-commerce was sort of starting and ASOS was one of the biggest ones and we built everything in house. It was so exciting to build everything in house. And ASOS really was, it was a fashion company.

It was actually, it was a tech company. Yeah. And then after ASOS, I was at Burberry for a couple of years, which is so different. It's luxury, is omnichannel.

And then I moved on to Boden, which is really 95% direct consumer online. It has a catalog, it's got great brand, but really the, it was all back, back to e-commerce, which I, which I loved. And now I'm at Pentland and it's sort of, the difference with Pentland, it's nearly 80%, if not more, wholesale. Yeah.

Great relationships. Loads of wholesales. It's got a DTC presence. And it has seven brands.

They're all quite individuals. Speedo, Mitre, Berghaus, Endura, Canterbury, and they're all quite distinct brands and we are replatforming their e-commerce sites right now. So that's sort of where. Well then I think that's definitely gotta be the first question.

How on earth? Because to me, in my mind, those brands are very different. How do you balance kind of shared technology, but keeping their individual brand identity? Yeah.

So I mean, you can think about imagery and obviously copy and brand tone, even things like fonts can visually differentiate the brand. But there's actually little things, like even the product data is slightly different. So yes, you can have a, a shared platform, not just the website. You'll have the backend, like what you call the PIM, where all the product information is held, that will be shared.

You might even have an ERP, like SAP that is shared, but every brand, you know, a brand that sells helmets versus a brand that sells swimsuits, a brand that sells footballs, the products are different. Yeah. So the data around it's different. And then how do you sell a football is different to how you sell swimsuits, how you sell, you know, a helmet.

So then your imagery and your photography and the, the identity will come through a lot with the imagery, the videos, how they're shot, and the copy and the tone of voice. And then these platforms, and especially nowadays, should be flexible enough that you might have a shared platform, but it can look quite different. You know, just to make it really basic, you could have what we call a product listing page or a category page. So the page that's men's tops, for example, it could be the one brand once on a desktop to have two images side by side.

And actually that takes up a lot of space and another brand by like, no, I want, my customer wants to see a lot of stuff, so I'll do four side by side. And then on mobile it's two side by side. But the other brand's like, no, we have some very expensive products and we wanna show their value. So we're gonna have only one tile you know, in a, in a column, in a mobile, as you scroll.

Platform, you don't know that the platform behind is exactly the same. The website looks very different. So you have to just think about and just build it to the brand and be flexible enough that the platforms can, can tweak to the brand's needs. So it really sounds like it's definitely customer first.

This is what the customer needs to see. It's what they want to buy. It's the way they want to shop. That's way more important than that tech stack behind.

Oh yeah, yeah. The tech has to just support it and, and the brand storytelling. So sometimes I know we are, we've been talking about, no other customer wants you know, give them, but sometimes they might not know that they need this amazing waterproof jacket that also has these air vents that also has like little, like, you know, the innovation part of a product, you need to educate the customer on to, for them to then want it. Then they, then you're giving them what they want, but they might have not known they wanted it.

So, there's also how do you make sure you can get that brand and the features and benefits and the stories behind it, or any kind of, it's sometimes there's an emotional story that not so much in sportswear, but you know in, like in Boden, it's like this is hand designed in house and you show a video of someone drawing something like, you know, that brings it to life. Did the customer think they wanted to know how something was drawn? Maybe not. But when they see it, it makes, it, it's quite special that they like, a human person drew that flower.

That's now all my dress, or. And I love this, it's retail first, it's not tech first. And I think that's a real honesty because I think for the last few years, even with AI now being everywhere, it's almost been that's what's been punched to the foreground. But actually what you're saying is no, forget that this is basic retail.

We have to talk about beautiful products or the way they're made or the authenticity. Of course, we have to meet the customer's needs. Yeah. I'll just say, on the reason why tech does become important is if you don't have the good enough tech, you don't show up.

So for example, you have the beautiful products and storytelling, but if your SEO isn't good, like in the past when people searched in Google, guess what? Your beautiful, wonderful product that is best for that customer doesn't come up. And that's when tech is important. So it was just that, that is why then tech comes noisy because everyone's like, well, yeah, you have great products, but you don't show up, do you?

And, and so you need to know what is the right tech, what's really important, and then it becomes part of brand. So you work together with brand these keywords or this, or you know, now it's AI's context. How do you use this product? You need to write it there because the LLM are gonna be searching for it when someone goes, "I wanna go hiking", and it's in the, in this temperature in this country, you've gotta have enough information that they find it.

But then that's also working with brands. That that's where I believe, like that's why tech ends up kind of getting mixed up. Yeah. Oh no, and that makes sense.

And it's making it more harmonious. It's not tech for tech's sake, but actually on that, legacy systems, I'm sure you've come across, you know, a lot in your time. How are you, and I think really based on kind of following on from what we've been talking about, how do you decide when to integrate, when to modernize, when to just throw it out or leave it alone? How do you know?

Yeah. It's so difficult because I mean, companies have budgets and investments, and everyone made a decision for a good reason at a point in time, right? They said this is the right tool because we wanna go international and the only way we can do is with this kind of technology, or we want to have a single customer view so we know what they want. And so you put that technology in and, but then over time, especially in the past, people either had to build in-house or get very expensive tools integrated with your other tools and it just becomes the costs.

When you invest in tech at the time, you're thinking about how, you know, what's the license cost or, or buying outright, what's the maintenance cost? Those things, you know, come into it. But what you don't think about till you're in it is there's this other cost, which is the integration. Like if I wanted, and the best example I give is, you know, at one point wanted a wishlist, which everyone knows about on a website.

But that had one technology in the checkout, which was different to the technology in that listing page where you press the heart, which was different to the team that worked on the my account, which usually where wishlist you, you go into your account, see your wishlist, right? Yeah. So to have a wishlist at that point was working with three different technology teams, two to three different platforms, and then, you know, it was six months. So that might have not been the only trigger, but when you start going, "I can't serve my customers what they want, I can't, you know, tell my story as a brand of what I want because technology is holding it back", that tends to be the trigger to we need to change.

'Cause either it's costing too much or we can't make the changes we want as quickly as we want. But there's a cost to that as well. So then you have to look at those costs. But yes, I mean that, that was a very good example where we'd found ourselves with this legacy stack, which had been built for good reason at the time 'cause we thought we needed this personalized kind of experience.

And for that you needed this kind of tool and, and another kind of tool for something else. But you ended up with three different platforms. So when you wanted something, like a wishlist, you couldn't deliver it. It just took so long.

And yeah. It's really, it's, and it's a fascinating insight, but it makes so much sense then as to when you need to do what you need to do. And you've gotta follow that by the sounds of it. Digital transformation then, and actually, this is something I don't think people talk about, often failed after you've done all that work, you've done the research, you know what you're at, you know why you need to do it.

But if the people kind of almost utilizing that day to day, the culture, if that's not lining up as well, it doesn't work. So I suppose in that respect, what shifts have you had to make internally, throughout all the brands you've worked with, to build a genuinely digital mindset? And actually, ensure the people like me who aren't tech savvy want to come on board as well. Yeah.

I've been in so many projects where IT delivers the tech Yes! To the teams who are like, we never asked for this. Yeah. Never asked for this.

And actually, yes, you asked our requirements six months ago, but never talked to us really since. Then asked us to test it right? Then we say we don't like it, and you go, oh, too late. You kind of Yeah 'cause all that money has been spent and the investment is there.

And then there's this kind of battle where, yeah, the IT team are like, but you did ask for it. And now, well, either things have moved on or you didn't understand us when we said we wanted that, but it's still that, it's awful when we are that. So in the most recent ones, replatforms, and people have, this is very common, people have learned from the past, is those teams who are being, who are going to be impacted, like e-commerce, customer service, mm-hmm finance, marketing.

They are part of the project at the beginning. And I know we say this all the time, but really when, when we mean part of projects, they really have to be part of the project, so they are in the requirement sessions. Every time tech wants to make a decision, like I'm very much like, if you don't need it or if it's, if, if you could live without it, if you could work around it, let's not do it 'cause it's much more important to try and go live and then change after. It's just easier.

You, you are wasting less money 'cause often you have two things going at the same time. You have the legacy and you have the new one you're building and the longer you wait to have everything that everyone wants. Yeah. You know, it's time and, and money wasted in a way, especially when you say you can get it later.

It's not that you'll never get it. But then people won't trust that because in the past it would take so long to get something they ask. I hear you. I hear you.

However, so what we did is with all the, these business teams that would be the users or you know, of, of these digital or tech products, is when a decision like that came along, like I would, you know, tech might say it's so expensive or complicated to do, it'll, it'll delay it by two months, or we don't even know how much it will cost because you are asking for something I know that you have today because legacy often meant that you could customize exactly to what was needed.

But these newer, quicker platforms, they're meant for everyone. So it doesn't always suit everyone. To make that compromise, you just like, you have to make the decision together so they feel heard. They know what they're getting into by not having something they're used to, and then you move forward together.

So it feels like it takes longer, but it actually doesn't take longer 'cause you're in it together. And by the time they're using it, first of all, they've been part of the whole user guide, training, testing. You do it together. And it's not always, you know, easy.

There's lots of decisions where we did go, okay, let's include it. Yes, let's build it and delayed it. But at the end, everyone felt the compromise was made on both sides. And you go live with, with people being part of the Go Live.

The Go Live wasn't IT delivered it, the business delivered it. The collaboration is there. Yeah, it was, yeah. It made such a difference.

Amazing, Ana, thank you so much for your insights today. It's been fantastic. You're welcome. Thanks for having me Matt Bradley, event director at Retail Technology Show.

Welcome back to the Retail Tea Break podcast. Thank you. So look, it is a couple of weeks away at this stage. Tell us what we could expect.

Well, biggest ever! Biggest amount of solution providers you've ever seen, close to 500 I think probably by the time the day comes round. They're on, they're ready with the solutions that will hopefully make those retailers business run more effectively, more efficiently and more profitably. Biggest ever conference, three theaters jam packed over a hundred speakers talking about all things covering retail, media, cybersecurity, leadership, the store, loss prevention, you name it, is covered.

The bar's looking incredible. The big party is gonna be sensational and you can expect a little bit of The Retail Technology Show magic sprinkled all across it. I love it. So remind us the date and the venue.

22nd. 23rd of April. London's ExCeL. Be there.

Registration is open. I'm sure you'll put a little thing down the bottom here now how to register. I will indeed! We'll pop it in the show notes.

Thanks so much, Matt. Pleasure. A huge thank you again to SmartGifty for bringing us this episode of the Retail Tea Break Podcast. SmartGifty is a modular experience and insights platform trusted by leading destinations and retail environments, from shopping centers and retail chains to independent businesses and tourism or food destinations.

SmartGifty empowers every place that treats its customers as guests, not just transactions. So for more information, visit www.smartgifty.com today.