How to optimise your retail business in turbulent times

Is the ecommerce returns problem overblown? Is ‘just in time’ or ‘just in case’ the right stock management approach? And how are retail leaders and challengers optimising their businesses to weather a turbulent business environment? 

Tune into this lively panel discussion with Boohoo, John Lewis, sofa-in-a-box company Swyft, and more retail leaders to get their take on:

• Strategies to drive business growth and optimisation in a volatile business environment.
• What the pandemic taught us about weathering the storms that continue to hit the retail industry.
• How to navigate critical stock, space, and labour challenges.

Tune in to hear our panel’s diverse views as we explore timely questions like…

How can retailers drive business growth and optimisation in a volatile business environment?

For sofa-in-a-box company, Swyft, surviving and thriving is all about differentiation. 

The challenger sofa brand drove impressive growth during the pandemic and has made a name for itself with its next-day-delivery promise which turns the traditional sofa purchase journey on its head.

‘Our mindset is very much “control the controllables” and continue to focus on where we can add value and offer value to the customer’, says CMO Geoff Bull. ‘That’s the way we’ve grown despite a really turbulent two and a half years since we started: offering a very differentiated product where we're really trying to put the customer first and challenging the category to do that’.

According to former John Lewis marketing head, Louisa Nicholls, navigating the tough months and even years ahead for retail requires us to escape routine thinking and get closer than ever to customers:

‘Understand your customer, be in the spaces they’re in, put yourself in their mindset. Then orchestrate your marketing strategy, your customer strategy, your trading strategy around that. Don’t just try to do what you always do’.

EasyJet in-flight retail director Simon Cox is another advocate for getting out of your comfort zone:

‘The pandemic showed us the need for agility and that nobody knows more than anybody else’, he says. ‘There’s going to be risk, and some decisions are going to turn out to be wrong. But you need to advocate for decision making and a degree of risk taking’.

How might retailers navigate critical stock, space, and supply challenges?

Our panel has very different approaches to optimising stock management and supply chain models.

For Swyft, with its lean manufacturing process and next-day delivery offering, a ‘just in time’ model is key to agility.

‘We just don’t want to tie up millions of pounds in stock that’s sitting in a warehouse’, says Geoff. ‘Our model is to be as nimble as possible’.

But it’s a different picture for emerging digital commerce players like EasyJet’s in-flight retail business.

‘We're in a fairly high margin part of the business. I'm definitely in the “just in case” camp when it comes to stock management. Certainty plays a bigger part for us. But finding the right approach is ultimately about your business model and how that's built and what's important to you’.

Alongside stock and space considerations, the labour challenge and opportunity is key, according to retail board advisor, Julian Burnett.

‘Finding the sweet spot between your labour opportunity, your space costs, annual stock. This is the place where most focus and attention will be’. 
 

What about the retail labour challenge?

With staff churn on many retailers’ minds, we asked our panel how organisations can address this challenge.

‘It’s about authenticity – it’s trust and care’, says Louisa Nicholls. ‘A lot of it is to do with the actions brands and businesses are taking to show that they care about their employees and their customers – to build that trust and loyalty. It takes two seconds to lose that and people, Gen Z in particular, will switch their allegiance to a brand overnight. So I think it's authenticity, it's trust and care’.

For Simon and EasyJet, the biggest challenge is addressing the loss of knowledge that comes with this staff turnover.

‘I think one of the challenges we're going to face, having had a period in which we haven't been flying, and our workforce has subsequently gone off and tried other jobs in other industries, is a loss of collective experience. And how you then identify what it means to work for a brand like easyJet’.

For Julian, this is why codifying knowledge is essential.

‘This is an industry that employs 60% of its workforce on a part time basis. That loss of knowledge has an impact. We're going to see – in stores, distribution centres, planes, head office – the risk of a reduction in knowledge and an increase in what I would describe as wheel reinvention. 

‘There's a real advantage to those organisations that retain knowledge not just in people but in their processes – and are able to quickly assimilate that knowledge through systems. I'm sort of beating the drum of technology and data here because finding a way of avoiding the reinvention of wheels is always a good thing’. 

Check out the video for more insights from our diverse retail panel.