Thanks for joining me everyone. In this video, we'll discuss a digital transformation that's taking place within the fashion industry. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that 2020 was a disastrous year for omnichannel fashion sellers. By the spring, nearly every aspect to the retail market seized up while most of the world went on the lockdown to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, how bad did it get? So bad that according to vote business, the luxury goods sector alone accounted for $10 billion in losses. Simply unprecedented. With retail arms closing for precautionary measures and consumers unwilling to shop in person, many physical locations have shuttered for good. Department stores, large change, direct to consumer brands, you name it, everyone saw dramatic losses for many multi-channel businesses, even online sales trended downward. Even if stores were open, many consumers either didn't have extra income to spent or they had increased their savings rate to cope with an uncertain future. This was also in part because the industry relies heavily on the Asia markets purchasing power, which had been severely affected by the pandemic since January. Still, it's clear that e-commerce has been a main lifeline for many clothing retailers. While they're still internal resistance within some companies about a transformation to e-commerce, we're seeing more and more CEOs become outspoken advocates of it because they have to. Corporate leadership needs to explicitly state from the get-go that their company is pushing e-commerce. Because without executive support of digital as a strategic priority, efforts can fail before they even begin. From there, remember that digital doesn't see it adjacent to what the business already does. The entire organization is accountable especially since everyone is impacted by the transition to e-commerce to some capacity. In order to have a positive income, you must create awareness and invest in cross-functional training and development to establish a baseline vocabulary and communicate the basic concepts. This way, everyone has a vested interest in seeing e-commerce succeed, rather than viewing it as an internal competition. First, you must acknowledge the need for new specialization. That means management needs to ensure activity is critical to e-commerce success aren't slipping through the cracks. Optimizing search placement on retailer site, developing and managing digital product content, and analyzing channel performance and profitability are among the roles and responsibilities that need to be covered. It is also important to understand that e-commerce success follows a different path. Companies need to be comfortable operating with a certain level of ambiguity. That's because you can't measure e-commerce based purely on existing metrics or traditional criteria. High-performing organizations give E-Commerce Teams a bit of latitude because they realize their goals, pathway, and the definitions of success are usually different in the more established channels. Also the question is where the e-commerce should report? There's no right answer for this. It depends on the strategic objectives and priorities as well as a company culture. But it pretty much comes down to sales or marketing, which 75 percent reporting to sales and 25 percent reporting to marketing. If your primary objectives are to generate volume, gain, market share, and get e-commerce on a path to profitability, then you should have it reporting to sales. Sales gives way to commercial decisions about distribution, pricing, promotion, and supply chain. The main drawback here is that you risk being under-resourced on the basis of overall channel line which is typically quite small as a proportion of total company sales of the channels profitability. Now, if your company's power is a building in protecting brand equity or driving awareness and influence, the marketing might be the best place for e-commerce to report. This allows you to draw synergies with other marketing disciplines, especially in areas like digital display advertising, search optimization, content marketing. However, you do run the risk of potentially under emphasizing the significance of supply chain, stock availability, pricing, and promotion. Increasingly common approach is aligning sales and marketing by establishing dotted line reporting relationships between where e-commerce directly reports and where it does. That is if e-commerce reports to sales establish a dotted line to marketing. Likewise, when reporting the marketing, have a dotted line to sales. During COVID-19, there's naturally been a drop-off in brick and mortar shopping which many dollar being a surefire increase in online shopping. Results have been mixed, although some industries, like household goods and groceries, have seen significant uptakes. For instance, JD.com, China's largest online retailer, saw sales of common household staples quadruple. An engine survey found that people are spending an average of 10-30 percent more online. From the outset of 2020, customer has been trying to shift their behaviors in order to adapt to the difficult times. Business owners are facing many of the same uncertainties as they attempt to balance their own needs with that of the consumers. As we navigate the new normal, businesses have and they will do what they've always done, learn and adapt. Except now it seems there's a few extra twist and turn along the way. Thanks for watching everyone. See you soon.
