The other piece, Quartel said, is the importance of thinking cross-channel. One of Fossil’s digital strategic pillars is to “meet the consumer where they are. And what I think that means for us is, try as much as possible to be channel-agnostic and to let your consumer shop in the channel that they’re most comfortable shopping in,” she says.
“It means that we do have to work on experiences and opportunities, not just in owned dot com and in stores, but also in marketplaces and in wholesale dot com. We’ve found that to be really helpful as a diversification strategy.”
It begs the question of how brands can drive innovation on channels that aren’t their own. Quartel said it often can be easier to innovate on middle to smaller marketplaces “because they’re better partners.”
Shop Premium Outlets has helped Fossil innovate across its channels, she says, such as doing livestream events from Fossil’s Simon property stores. SPO also has a partnership with Tmall, so it selectively livestreams into China.
As for bricks-and-mortar, Quartel said she has been surprised by store associates who think of ecommerce as hurting the business, or even Amazon as “the big bad.” She shared the possibilities marketplaces can provide, and said there may be need for education around “how you can think creatively about leveraging the assets across channels.”
Though many equate Fossil with watches, she says, it is a portfolio company, owning and or/licensing roughly 15 brands in the watch, leather and jewelry space, selling them across a variety of channels.
Practitioners all have specific KPIs within various divisions, Reily says. But consumers don’t really care where stuff comes from. They just want the stuff. “I will frequently advise brands: If your customers can tell when they’ve crossed a business unit in your company, you’ve failed,” he said. “And that happens all the time.”
Whether in-store or online, continued innovation — and testing — is paramount, the panelists said. They also recommended organizing for desired innovative outcomes; at Fossil, pulling together the marketplace and DTC teams was a “massive organizational unlock,” Quartel said.
“Be selective and test and learn,” Grover said. That might mean expanding into different marketplaces, or even delineating by product set or subset. The good news is that no retailer has to go it alone; as the field has grown, so has the number of experienced people who know how to make it happen.
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