What you need to know:

• Two years since being acquired by Nicola and Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest’s Tatterang, RM Williams has made significant martech and marketing investment.
• Now it’s paying off: 30 per cent conversion rate gains and basket size increases, web traffic up 30 per cent, in-store sales increases, per CTO Nathan Alexander.
• UK expansion is next, but the market locally and globally is starting to soften as economic pain hits. Alexander is focusing on CX to remove friction to offset demand drops.
• RM Williams also struggling to meet demand for repairs, a cornerstone of its ‘boots for life’ promise. It needs more cobblers in Australia and UK. “It’s a great problem to have, but we need to resolve it,” per Alexander.
• Next investment: AR tech to enable customised boots.

Nicola and Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest’s Tatterang brought RM Williams back into Australian ownership exactly two years ago. Prior to that it had six years under US$33bn LVMH-backed L Catterton. The private equity house ramped up production to drive sales – but built up “tech debt” that the bootmaker has now cleared. Chief Technology Officer Nathan Alexander said in tandem with major marketing and retail efforts it’s paying off – though wishes he’d asked for a bigger budget.

“L Catterton, to be fair to them, got the business into a state where it could sustain itself. It wasn’t that they didn’t invest, but they were focused on making the business healthy, so there was a fair bit of technical debt built up, because that is not where they wanted to invest the money at the time,” Alexander told Mi3.

The upshot was that “we were fragmented, had no way to listen, for customers to provide feedback and messaging capability was limited”, he said. “We couldn’t do what we wanted to do.”

When the Forrests bought the business, they and the board recognised the gaps in customer understanding. “They said, ‘if you had the investment, what would you do?’ And that was their challenge: ‘Negotiate hard – always negotiate hard – but how do we also be the best and be sharp in the right way?’”

That “reset” led to an expansion of its existing ecom partnership with Salesforce and to also bring in the NewStore point of sale system, created by DemandWear (now CommerceCloud) founder Stephan Schambach.

“We actually changed all the technology systems that touch the customer, making sure it’s been architected correctly – and that’s really helped us push forward,” said Alexander.

Transformation lessons: Contingency

Asked what he would do differently in overhauling martech, Alexander told the recent Melbourne Salesforce retail conference he’d “ask for more money”. He later told Mi3, “That was tongue in cheek, probably a bit too flippant”.

“What I meant is that when we presented to the board, it was our first investment case. We put in a lot of thought, pulled together all the costs and put it forward. There was a little bit of contingency, but in hindsight, what I should have said to the board was ‘these are the hard numbers at this point. But as we move through something of this complexity in size, there's going to be things that we will uncover along the way that we cannot foresee now. So please be aware that could happen’,” said Alexander.

It’s a refreshingly honest take and Alexander underlined that the results – a 30 per cent ecom conversion rate increase, “and we’re also seeing increases in store”, 30 per cent average basket size increases and circa 25 per cent traffic boost – are down to marketing and retail teams as much as the new tech.

“The technology transformation is an enabler, but it is not the only one. Our marketing team has done an exceptional job of crafting stories: The 90th anniversary for RM Williams, the Commonwealth Games, Life's Journeys [a new brand platform] … All of that has been the result of our marketing team pulling together that back story for the top of funnel – and that needs to be absolutely recognised. Then there's the teams in our stores who when people walk in, they're converting those people into sales,” said Alexander.

“The technology supports them to do that. But at the end of the day, it's this amazing group of people that have been assembled that are helping craft the ideas, the stories and putting the products into a customer setting. It's not all about the technology, it's a team effort. Historically I probably haven't done a good job in making sure that we call that out. They did a fantastic job.”

Marketing + martech = growth

The marketing effort around Life’s Journeys has enabled the CRM team to take the data driven by those stories – customers’ actual life stories and why they bought their boots – and create “better customer segments and audiences … and tailor and personalise offers around their prior behaviour”, per Alexander.

“So if they have just bought a pair of Erica boots, we’re not going to send them an EDM for another pair. But we know they haven’t bought a belt, some denims or a moleskin jacket to go with those boots. So we're starting to take the transactional information that's coming through and use the tools to make a better offer and show the customer that we understand them – not just spray and pray to everyone, sending them all the same stuff.”

Ecom boom under pressure

RM Williams’ business is currently circa 15 per cent ecom versus physical retail, with targets to double digital sales over the next five years. But digital growth as a result of marketing-martech investment is timely as retailers start to feel the effects of rate rises and consumer belt-tightening in tandem with the end of the Covid ecom boom.

“We are [feeling that slowdown] to be completely honest with you,” admitted Alexander. “At the start of the year it was like the gates opened and we’re off. It was very, very strong. But the last few weeks we are definitely seeing economic conditions start to soften the market. Not so much in conversions, but we're seeing a definite contraction in the traffic and revenue numbers … across the board, in-store and online.”

While hoping for the best, Alexander said the firm is also preparing for potentially worse to come – while sweating the digital investments made over the last 18 months.

“Our CEO has a great saying: You don’t fix the roof when it’s raining. So in terms of the headwinds that could be ahead of us, I’m trying to bring our teams together to be able to weather that. We’re going to have good times and bad times and I want to make sure they are resilient to get through that,” said Alexander.

“With our digital team, we’re saying ‘given economic conditions are coming off, it’s on us now to do an even better job of reducing friction on our website, in our digital experiences’. The better we can make that, the higher our conversion rate. That’s the theory. But if we do that, it should help offset some of the shrinkage in traffic – and in the short-term, that’s what we’re doing to mitigate some of the headwinds that could be coming.”

UK expansion: new chapter, stories

Australia may escape the worst of a global downturn and Alexander said business expansion in New Zealand is currently tracking “strongly”. The UK is a little less likely to emerge unscathed, given the economic challenges piling up, which makes it an interesting time to enter the market. But if RM Williams can crack the UK in choppy conditions, it bodes well for further US expansion.

“The UK and US markets are still very small to us. But we do have an international focus and we are trying to invest our energy [initially] into one of those markets. We’ve just put a UK country manager in place, Phil Rowbottom, who used to run digital for RM Williams but is also from the UK [and has two decades of physical and ecom retail fashion sales under hit belt],” said Alexander. “That’s important, because we want to tell this great story about our brands and our products, but we also need to understand the nuances of those markets, and you need someone on the ground to help you bring that to life.”

It’s a longer burn, but Alexander said RM Williams has similar triple digit growth targets to ecom for its international operations.

“We have really big aspirations. It’s going to take a bit more time and the strategy for the UK is a little different, but the first thing is to get the right people on the ground to tell that story – and Phil is a big first step.

“The other piece is making sure that we have a really solid foundation from our technology, our systems, our manufacturing and our supply chain to support that international growth. That's why the international story is definitely a longer journey for us; we want to make sure that we do it in a really thoughtful way and we do it right. To grow a market takes a lot of capital. We want to make sure the business can sustain that investment and that growth.”

Hence the martech investment helping to underpin expansion, but with new, UK-focused stories filling the funnel and feeding the personalisation engines. In the four months since Rowbottom landed in the UK, those stories are now being told, said Alexander. “He’s helped us reshape the content – and we’re starting to see some really good results.”

Boots for life: Cobblers required

RM Williams promises boots for life – and already high demand for repairs will likely climb as people feel the pinch.  The bootmaker needs more cobblers to keep up, locally and internationally, where it must forge new relationships.

It’s not a unique problem. The likes of Nudie Jeans can also struggle to meet demand, with repair times of up to 12 weeks, presenting a balancing act for brands that trade on goods for life as a core proposition. “It does [pose a challenge],” admitted Alexander, who said RM Williams is sitting at “similar” wait times.

“It's one of the priorities for us as a business, both locally but also international markets, because we are seeing demand for those services increase. We've got a repair workshop in Adelaide and they repair all of the boots. But we've got so much demand for repairs that we can't keep up. So we're looking for cobbler services in country and partners abroad to help us bolster our ability to service the products,” he said. “These are amazing problems to have, but they are problems we have to resolve.”

Cobblers must meet a “strict vetting process”, but if RM Williams can find enough partners that it trusts to – literally – maintain the brand, Alexander thinks a month-long turnaround time is “fair”. Over time, a fortnight would be the ideal standard. In the meantime, he’s using the martech to better manage the process, comms and customer expectation.

Next: AR customisation

The next CX phase is AR-enabled customisation of products, with the bootmaker now vetting potential tech partners for product modelling and AR technology.

“We’ve got a shortlist of three partners. The first step is to land on the right one and also work out the best way for us to represent the product, whether that's 3D modelling and CAD or whether it's photorealism,” says Williams.

“So there are some pieces we've got to work through, and it won’t come to life until next year. But as we build out our online business – and our international business – we want to design with new experiences in mind. We don’t want to build any future roadblocks for ourselves.”