Does One Size Fit All? On Content Strategy with Charlotte Cole of Farfetch

Summary

Does one size fit all when it comes to our content strategy? That’s the question we posed to todays guest, Charlotte Cole, Senior Director of Content Development at Farfetch. Spoiler alert, the answer is not yes. We discuss personalization, regionalization, localization and all the factors that go into an effective global content strategy. 

Key Takeaways

• Does one size fit all? No. It never has, but there wasn't many options to serve your many customer segments.
• The e-comm landscape has learned a lot in recent years that points to this need. The political and social landscape does shape how your customers shop.
• In fashion, we've often spoken about our customers in too narrow of terms. You need many more personas and subsections, or an entire shift in the way you think about your customers.
• At Farfetch, content creation has become de-centralized in order to make better content for those customers.
• Personalization is really a sort of catch all term in how the experience is built. While it CAN be, it's not only about getting an ad specifically for you or receiving a mailer with your name on it.
• At Victorias Secret, personalization and regionalization are two halves of the same whole. It helps you get the customer to not just A shopping experience, but the RIGHT shopping experience.
• DEI means different things to different cultures. What diversity means is different when you're in a predominately western culture vs. the other cultures around the world.
• It may require another approach to branding. Build a system that allows many diverse team members create content that is ON BRAND while culturally relevant.
• Translation is NOT the same thing as localization.
• For global success in content strategy, you have to learn everything you can about your customer.
• What's the ROI on creative? We still don't know but we're really REALLY trying.

Full episode transcript

Daniel Jester:

From Creative Force, I'm Daniel Jester, and this is the E-commerce Content Creation podcast. Does one size fit all when it comes to our content strategy? That's the question we posed to today's guest, Charlotte Cole, senior Director of Content Development at Farfetch. Spoiler alert, the answer is not yes.

Charlotte Cole:

Imagine if I just said, yeah. End of podcast.

Daniel Jester:

Done.

Charlotte Cole:

Done.

Daniel Jester:

We're wrapped.

Charlotte Cole:

No, and as you said, it never has, but we didn't really have any other option. It certainly does not fit all now. And beyond that, it's inexcusable for a lot of companies these days of any size or of any breadth or width to be treating content as a one size fits all operation. And obviously for me, it's specific to e-commerce and retail fashion.

Daniel Jester:

We go on to discuss personalization, regionalization, localization, and all of the factors that go into an effective global content strategy. So, with that, let's jump in.

Lauren Stefaniak:

This is the E-commerce Content Creation podcast. I'm Lauren Stefaniak Smith, guest co-host for this episode.

Daniel Jester:

And I'm your host, Daniel Jester. Lauren, that was great.

Lauren Stefaniak:

Thank you.

Daniel Jester:

You did so good. Yeah, I don't think we have to take that again. Take 55, that's the one.

Lauren Stefaniak:

Yeah, we did it.

Daniel Jester:

We did it. Our guest for this episode, Charlotte Cole of FARFETCH. Charlotte, welcome to the show.

Charlotte Cole:

Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me.

Daniel Jester:

So, obviously for our listeners, this is a new thing. This is our first episode of the podcast where we are introducing a guest co-host, our guest, Charlotte Cole. And the conversation that we're having, and we're going to jump right in, Charlotte, does one size fit all when we're talking about content strategy? One size had to fit all in the past. Does one size fit all anymore? And what do we think the future's going to look like? Charlotte.

Charlotte Cole:

Great question. Imagine if I just said, yeah. End of podcasts.

Daniel Jester:

Done.

Charlotte Cole:

Done. Thank you.

Daniel Jester:

We're wrapped.

Charlotte Cole:

No. And as you said, it never has, but we didn't really have any other option. It certainly does not fit all now. And beyond that, it's inexcusable for a lot of companies these days, of any size, of any breath or width, to be treating content as a one size fits all operation. And obviously for me, it's specific to e-commerce and retail fashion. And when it comes to that, quite literally with the clothes that we sell and the content that we produce, we need it in all shapes and sizes and languages.

Lauren Stefaniak:

Yeah, so on that one, I think it's important to think about what's changed, right? Because we've been through a rough few years in retail. So, what have we learned in the e-com landscape in the last few years that points to a need for more bespoke content?

Charlotte Cole:

I think we've learned a lot of resilience over the past few years. I'll say that. And I don't think we are finished yet. It's going to be very adaptive few years to see how people can keep up with a really rapidly evolving political and social landscape that's going to be changing the way that people shop. I think overall, what we've learned is to truly focus on your customer base. You really can't go wrong if you are completely honed in on what your customers want, what they need, and what that means in terms of regions, in terms of, I guess true diversity, both behind and in front of the camera or pen or laptop as it may be, to make sure it's truly representative of what that customer needs and not just the product of a think tank in a boardroom, for example.

Daniel Jester:

This feels a little bit like it's come from marketing. And I'm not a marketing expert at all, but marketing has often worked in personas and sort of defining. And I know this was true when I was at Nordstrom. Through outlook, we had very clear personas of who our customers were. But I don't know the right word, I don't know the right term to use for it, but you have to start to look at groups of people in much different ways than just saying our customer is either a 35 year old male or a 27 year old female, and that's it.

Charlotte Cole:

Absolutely. Absolutely. You're bang on that it has been a way in fashion that we've really spoken about our customer, and we need to move beyond past that. So, it can absolutely be useful in terms of merchandising, in terms of getting a grasp on how you can express your brand and who's really listening to you as a brand, but it can be quite limiting. It can be quite derivative if you are not focusing on true localization. Because just as you said, Daniel, you can have a group of subsections of these personas that are relevant to Europe, but they're not going to be relevant to Africa. They're not going to be relevant to South Asia, east Asia, other parts of the world where there are very different shopping habits and cultural backgrounds or demographics.

And even if you break things down into tiny subsection of saying we have this emerging Gen Z shopper, and let's say they're from a relatively affluent background, let's say they are currently in international students, that's still going to look different if it's a student that's in the UK from mainland China, or if it's someone from India who's based in the US now. All of those customers are going to be different. So, we need to either come up with a million personas or just shift onto a different type of data analytics, I guess.

Lauren Stefaniak:

So on that topic, what are some prevalent assumptions about personalization, regionalization, et cetera that are incorrect or misleading?

Charlotte Cole:

God, big question. I suppose one of the challenges we've come up against, and it's something that we're always thinking about and we're trying to challenge ourselves on, is centralization versus decentralization when it comes to decision making about personalization or localization, because there are huge advantages of having a centralized team of experts that have so much knowledge about different subsets of customers all around the world and can produce content for them, but you are never going to be able really to walk in the shoes of someone that is based in that location who is still completely 100% immersed in that. So, more and more, our content creation, where it's been available to us in our bigger markets, we've tried to decentralize and make sure that we have people on the ground that are just living and breathing the content that they're producing and also not trying to control them. So, we have to work within framework, of course, we have kind of global guidelines and stuff that is a bit more homogenous.

But when it comes to decision making about content, let people from that region make their own decisions for their own customer base because they'll always do it better than you will.

Daniel Jester:

And the assumptions around personalization specifically, I kind of want to touch on that because I think personalization actually means something in practice when we talk about content production means something different than what we think about when we hear personalization. Because when I hear personalization, in the past, I've thought of the mailer that comes in the mail that has my name on it or something like that, but personalization can be a little bit broader than that. Personalization is a little bit of an umbrella that can mean... I think in some cases it can mean by region or by location. When we say personalization, we're talking about personalization for a larger group of people than a specific individual, but it isn't always necessarily about when we're talking about content production. And again, we are talking about content production. And I know we've touched on merchandising, personas play a role in merchandising and all of that kind of thing, but we're talking about taking the product, producing the content to help us sell that product, and then using it in places for more of a marketing standpoint.

Personalization can also just mean an ad that specifically is speaking to people in Glasgow, like here's this ad that mentions where we are. And that, it turns out, actually does move the needle a little bit in some marketing efforts.

Charlotte Cole:

Absolutely, absolutely can. And you're right, it is such a catchall personalization and it can mean everything. One person in a company will see it entirely from the data architecture standpoint. Another person is going to see it in terms of customer engagement and nothing else. And for content creation, it has to be about that seamless experience and fundamentally getting the right customer to the products that we are producing based on the content that we're providing. And that can be really hard. And there's everything from metadata and tagging and labels and trying to enrich your product as much as possible so that a customer can have a navigation experience on our website, and then be driven towards what they want, because we already know what they want because the experience is so personalized and they've ticked all of those GDPR boxes that we want them to tick so that we can know a bit more about them.

But it's an interesting one, and I guess the infinite loop of conversations for personalization is about the infinite loop that if everything becomes very personalized and you know what people want, and then because of that, you tailor the website for them, they end up seeing the products that we already have a preconceived notion that they will enjoy and you end up trapping them and they can't quite discover other stuff on the website. Especially for a product like Farfetch where we have well over half a million products on the website, we want them to see more, not limit. So, it's a fine balance when it comes to content production for personalization.

Daniel Jester:

It becomes almost like visual merchandising digitally and specifically to an individual or a type of persona from a given area. Lauren, does Victoria's Secret do anything like this today? That seems like it would be a really... Because Victoria's Secret also, similar to Farfetch, has a wide variety of types of things that shoppers go to you for. Where are you guys at on personalization?

Lauren Stefaniak:

Yeah, great question. So, I think the way that we view the difference between personalization and regionalization is that they are two halves of one whole, and then they get you to the right customer experience in those new landscapes. So for us, in the regionalization space, we are selling in many markets right now, mostly digital, but we do have some store presence as well. We're selling on partner sites and markets where we can't necessarily show our own site, but we are just scratching the surface on personalization and saying, what is the content the customer wants to receive in the way that she wants to see it? How do we display it to her in the best possible way to get her to convert and buy something? But Charlotte, I think to your point, you have to be careful you're not swinging the pendulum so far in the direction that you're creating this echo chamber of what she's searching for, because then you're not cross-selling, you're not building a basket based on what you think she might like.

It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy of, well, I want this so I'm only going to buy this, versus right now if you have this kind of wiggle room around, I'm going to browse on the site and I'm going to see what else is out there, and it might not be something I was shopping for, but now I'm interested. I think because we're so early in our journey on personalization, period, we haven't gotten to that point yet, but I could imagine soon, we're going to find that we're working our way back out of that hole that we build ourselves into.

Daniel Jester:

Charlotte, I want to touch on this topic. There's a bunch of things that we have listed out that we want to talk about on this that Lauren and I came up with to talk with you about. But one thing I want to touch on, because you brought this up at the Pixelz FLOW event in Barcelona, and I thought it was just super insightful, about the idea of personalization, localization, regionalization. We need to come up with a term that means these three things so I can stop saying those words over and over again again, but how DEI factors into this. And we have a tendency, I think, and I only am aware of this because of what you said in Barcelona, Charlotte, that we have a tendency to view DEI through the filter of our own experiences. Of course, we do, through that lens, right? But DEI doesn't mean the same thing when you're working within a region that is not predominantly white people or whatever.

Charlotte Cole:

Absolutely, absolutely. Diversity itself, and certainly a DNI program in a company, it needs to be itself diverse if you're a global company. So, if we were, let's say as the Farfetch HQ in London to come up with a DNI program that was for the entire globe for all of our different offices, that would be an enormous problem, and in itself quite an echo to the traditional way in which British companies have moved forward with these types of decision making of thinking. Surely everyone should listen to us. We're the ones that have all of the knowledge on this. It's a horrific way to start a program like that.

So, whether it's.... I don't know. Our biggest offices are based in Portugal, but then we are scattered so beyond. We've got Brazil, we've got Tokyo, we've got mainland China, of course, we've got Dubai. And every single one of those regions needs to work within their own cultural context to build out a plan for DNI. Because again, that's the only way for us to then of course support our staff, first and foremost, to make sure that our internal practices and behind the camera, behind the pen, behind the laptop, we've got the right people from a various group of backgrounds, but then also translate that into the work that we do as well, because again, you can't just have, let's say a US or European centric organization coming up with a content plan for a global customer. It would be a nightmare, be awful.

Lauren Stefaniak:

So, Charlotte, on that topic then, what happens if you have these localized teams who are building content that doesn't necessarily agree or ladder up to the giant brand projection or maybe competing with each other? What do you do in those cases?

Charlotte Cole:

Interesting. So, everything does tie into the overarching brand. So, of course you've got the Farfetch group. But if we look at farfetch.com as at our marketplace specifically, we have brand principles, we have a supply strategy, we have an overarching kind of ethos that we work towards. So, in terms of content production, especially for the e-commerce side that we would focus on in my team, it's relatively simple, but what we want to build within that structure is then freedom. So, for example, if we look at the actual language localization for mainland China as one example where we have quite a large team and we have a lot more freedom because it's a huge market for us, we would rather not spend time just translating original English into Chinese, but instead produce original Chinese content.

It takes almost the same amount of time and it is infinitely better, not just because channels for product display are so different for the Chinese market, but also because so much of what we produce, let's say for the homepage for localization or even for our product imagery is just not relevant and sometimes not even legal in China. So, when it comes to product descriptions, the consumer, there is a lot of authenticity and specificity that is needed for Chinese product details that don't exist in the European market or the US market for example. So, we may as well just write things from scratch for mainland China, and we should absolutely give our teams freedom to do so.

Daniel Jester:

That makes so much sense to me. And I really want to put a fine point on that for our listener because I feel like this is an area where content teams do have a tendency to take the path of least resistance. I have learned some phrases and languages to help me navigate some of the places in Europe that I've been, and I'm always worried that the translation app is telling me something that's technically correct but not culturally correct, if that makes sense. Like, yes, that's how you would say that if you're translating it, but it's not how you would say that as a matter of being part of the culture of the moment or whatever it is.

Charlotte Cole:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Translation versus localization, it is... versus transcreation. Again, it's a time and a place for all three. And obviously I'm biased, but I would just love localization or transcreation for it all, but it's not always practical.

Daniel Jester:

Lauren, I feel like you asked that question also, because we talked about this when we met before this podcast, which is that there is this sort of newly emerging market to a lot of western companies in the form of the mid east. The Middle East has a lot of cultural considerations as well, and I think you really nailed it, Lauren, which is that, and what you said as well, Charlotte... Of course the two smartest people that I know in the industry are talking to each other, of course it's going to be brilliant stuff. Listeners, I hope you're paying attention.

Charlotte Cole:

Stop it, Daniel.

Daniel Jester:

But the best branding is not somebody telling everybody else how to be on exactly what to do or say. The best branding comes from teaching your teams around the world how to be on brand. And then you have to layer that over how to be culturally sensitive and appropriate as well. And now. I used to describe that cost, speed, quality triangle, that brand fits in there somewhere and maybe should be its own thing, because if you're a brand and you're producing content, you have to also care about how fast, how good, and how much it costs, but also is it on brand? And I think to be successful globally, now this thing going from a Venn diagram or a triangle to some kind of a carousel because I think culture has to become part of that. Are we on brand and culturally appropriate?

Charlotte Cole:

Absolutely.

Lauren Stefaniak:

Definitely. And I think that's exactly right where my head was at when asking that question. Because when I think about Victoria's Secret and how we enter new markets, first, I know we're thinking about, is this market right for our brand? Do the products that we sell even make sense? And in the case of the Middle East, we said, yeah, we're going to try it. But with that comes the responsibility of doing it. So, we don't just want to push our brand into a market and say, "You know what? We're Victoria's Secret. We have very sexy product. This is what it is, take it or leave it," because that is just so brand damaging and really not the right thing to do, right? So, figuring out how we can enter a new market in a market that is traditionally not aligned with our brand purpose has been so interesting and cool to see.

Perfect example, inside of our Middle East market, we produce bespoke content that we consider modest. There are modesty restrictions and regulations around it that we work with our Middle East partners on to understand our campaign video is way too sexy to go into these marketplaces, but we do want to register our campaign there and have a holiday moment. So, what is acceptable, what isn't, towing the line and figuring out what's still brand, what can we get through has been interesting. And I think we're doing it fairly successfully since we've been doing bigger and more campaigns than we've ever done before.

Daniel Jester:

I want to pivot the conversation to... We've sort of addressed the idea of why this makes sense, why if you're a brand or retailer or whomever producing content that's consumed globally, that you need to be thinking about and looking at this, how do we get this information? Charlotte, you brought up AB testing in Barcelona, and this is a topic that I've wanted to have on this podcast for a long time. In order to be successful with this, we have to have a way to test our creative. Am I right on that?

Charlotte Cole:

Absolutely. We have to be obsessive about understanding our customer, and that comes from extensive testing, both qualitative and quantitative. And yes, for AB testing, it's still not commonplace for e-commerce content to be AB tested, namely because in order to successfully do an AB or an ABC test, you need to produce variance of that same content, which has a huge price tag associated to it. It's very cumbersome with logistics. So, you need to be a company with a certain mindset and a freedom for the investment to come through in order to achieve that. And we've been very lucky over the years to have the faith. I think because we're a tech company fundamentally, we've had board members and members of staff who've been very supportive about giving us the investment we need to do AB testing. And it would be no surprise to anyone that without any test we've ever done, whether it's size and fit, product enrichment, proving our styling and our imagery quality, all of it increases conversion rate, GTV, and reduces return rate.

Without a shadow of a doubt, it has a huge impact on the customer. The vast majority of customers land on product pages and listing pages. A very small percentage go to homepages. There are some very loyal customers, of course, who go to farfetch.com, and then navigate, but the vast majority of our traffic comes onto specific brand or category pages or individual products that they already want. So, it's really important for us to understand that's where our content and our brand and really where the extent of our quality should live. And we've got a long way to go on this, but we've been very lucky to AB test our way into quite a lot of success. And actually, we're just starting a new content testing program now, working with consumer products, trying to build out a new framework that's going to last hopefully for the next three to five years. So, looking forward to keeping in touch with you all over the coming years. You know how it goes. The trajectory is still [inaudible 00:20:18]

Daniel Jester:

Yeah, it's super exciting. Yeah, that felt like an almost bombshell moment on this podcast, is breaking news, because I've had this conversation with people. It's come up a lot. The things that we're talking about in this episode today have come up a lot at creative operations conferences this year, personalization, localization, regionalization, and also testing content and gathering those insights. And what I learned that I think is really interesting is that not many e-com platforms are actually built to do effective content testing. You can certainly build... You can divert landing pages, and again, you can test copy and you can test other things, but in act, building a system that is really good at testing specifically the imagery or the videos, or I guess imagery encompasses video, but you get what I'm saying, that some platforms just aren't actually built for that, and it's probably going to require some new advancements from some of our adjacent technologies outside of content production in order to really enable this at scale for a lot of brands.

Charlotte Cole:

Absolutely. It's as if you've been listening in on my meetings over the past couple of weeks, Daniel.

Daniel Jester:

I have been, yes.

Charlotte Cole:

You have? I wondered who that was.

Daniel Jester:

I planted bug on your sweater-

Charlotte Cole:

I wondered who that was.

Daniel Jester:

... in Barcelona and I've been getting all-

Charlotte Cole:

I just thought-

Daniel Jester:

... all the information.

Charlotte Cole:

... it's so exciting. I'm important to dove to be hacked.

Daniel Jester:

No, I'm actually a spy. For whom, I do not know. But yeah, this is all a rouse.

Charlotte Cole:

Oh man. Well, I'm glad you got all of the dirt from what's going on in Farfetch then, because yes, they're having the pipelines laid to be able to do proper AB testing is so difficult. And it's something that... Again, because we're a tech company, we've got incredible people working on our platform, kind of the back office behind the scenes for all of this, but it is a slow and steady race that needs constant upgrades and improvements to be able to test content as freely as much as we want to. We want to test every single good idea, but that takes an awful lot of development roadmap space.

Lauren Stefaniak:

So, for someone like me who is not a spy and not on the inside, how does AB testing work? Because I think something that we think about a lot from a creative standpoint is what's the ROI on creative? And I feel like across the board, there's generally just a giant question mark there. So, how do you AB test against something that seems so difficult to pin down like an ROI?

Charlotte Cole:

Yeah. So, there's one particular example. Because I could talk about size and fit, but I think everyone knows that size and fit is so connected to returns, it feels like a bit more of a no-brainer, whereas creative and quality... It was a few years ago is our creative director for e-commerce, Charlotte Simpson, she was tasked, let's say, with coming up for with a way to prove the ROI on our imagery because she knew, I knew, we all knew that having better imagery, having much more kind of richer styling and styling that was more representative of our customer and higher quality photography, renovating our backgrounds, generally just investing in our e-commerce product imagery, we knew in our bones it was going to be something that would help us succeed as a business. But when we're producing half million items a year, you can imagine what our financial teams were reacting to when we came to them with a proposal for x many million to invest in it.

So, we managed to convince Luis Teixeira, our COO, to do an AB test or allow us to do an AB test for an extended period of time. And I think it took between nine months and a year to get the full range of results, because of course, it is slow and steady, especially when it was early days for us. It wasn't when... I think it's the first AB test we ever did in creative operations at Farfetch. So, Charlotte did it, worked with our in studio production team, obviously, and it's just an incredible group of people, and consumer products and with our business operations teams. We had data analysts. Again, when it was very early for Farfetch to have... We didn't have quite such a large data analytics team at the time, but we had people that were dedicated entirely to this to see if we could prove the value, just to be really curious.

She came up with a whole new creative direction for it. And sure enough, nine months later, when we got the results back, conversion rate improvement was enormous, absolutely skyrocketed, and it put in place the base level part of our imagery, which we call gold, our gold imagery for our top products now that's just standard. It's BAU for us. We treat products in that way. So, it was a real turning point for us to use that baseline, to use that way of working to inform our decision making from then on.

Daniel Jester:

Charlotte, what is the most interesting tidbit that you've learned from an AB test, not just conversion? But for listeners of this podcast, I'm sure I've mentioned it 80 something episodes in, I'm an alumni of Farfetch and I remember hearing some pretty wild things. We were hearing things in the studio in LA that Farfetch knows that in the Chinese market, if that shopper's on an iPad, they want to see eight images minimum and their conversion rate is much better if they... So, what are some of the most interesting tidbits you've learned from this type of test and how are you collecting that information?

Charlotte Cole:

Such a good question. Because yeah, I think it's one thing to take away from any type of testing is the devil is in the details. You have to get into the trenches to find the microcosms of juicy information in order to make some good decisions, because general data, you can kind of get lost in it. You can say, okay, maybe return rates are getting worse. Cool. The return rate tells us that. It doesn't tell us why and it doesn't tell us what we can do, so you really need to get into the data with some qualitative insights as well, doing some proper user testing and having face to face time with regular users of the website to see where things might be falling down, for example, and to make sure that's global so you're not just getting a Eurocentric view on that. But some of the best details...

Okay, I tell you, I guess a recent one is around size and fit, because size and fit is an absolute minefield and it's a bit of a rising tide. You need to fix everything with your size and fit experience in order to see the benefit. You can't just think, okay, maybe I'll improve fitting advice and it will immediately have an effect. No, you also need to change the measurements, you need to change the size scales, you need to work on a fit prediction algorithm at the same time. And then maybe, just maybe some of it will get better.

But when we were digging into this and we were getting right into all of the information about every customer base and then every country possible to figure out which categories, subcategories, families of products, cross sectioned with brands, how are they all performing and why, and that's where we uncovered some of our favorite behavior, what we can affectionately call, I guess, positive returns, which is in areas such as Germany, it's very common to do bracketing, which is where you buy multiple sizes of the same product on purpose because everybody has free returns and it's just culturally normal. And actually, there are some regions where you don't pay until you've made the final return. So, there's no skin in the game about it.

Daniel Jester:

Interesting.

Charlotte Cole:

Isn't it? Very Interesting.

Daniel Jester:

It's like the Stitch Fix model a little bit, right?

Charlotte Cole:

It is, yeah.

Daniel Jester:

You get the box for free, and then you pay for whatever you like.

Charlotte Cole:

Exactly, exactly.

Daniel Jester:

Speaking of, the shirt that I'm wearing, this very moment, Charlotte and Lauren, after this call, I need to go return the extra large because the large fit fine.

Charlotte Cole:

Well, just know that you are affecting someone's return rate.

Daniel Jester:

I know that, and I apologize for that, but this shirt, this was for a date night with my wife and it was a high stakes date night, so it had to work. It really needed to work. We hadn't been out in years.

Charlotte Cole:

I mean, it's a great shirt. I'm glad you picked that one.

Daniel Jester:

It's a really... It's nice, right? I love it.

Charlotte Cole:

It's Gorgeous.

Daniel Jester:

I was... You guys don't know me.

Lauren Stefaniak:

I think you need to pose for the screen shot.

Daniel Jester:

I know we're going to have to post the screen. Charlotte, as we're wrapping up time for this episode. And Lauren, I'm going to pose this question to you as well. We'll go to Charlotte first and then you can follow, but it's a question that I've been wanting to ask. I'm going to ask every guest on the podcast. I would love to know from you, over the next 12 months, or if 12 months isn't the right timeframe, we can adjust it, what do you see as your teams or your organization's biggest challenges over the next 12 months, whether that's around people, process, or technology, the economy? What are you thinking about? What are you not necessarily concerned about, but what are you focused on in the next 12 months?

Charlotte Cole:

I would say the last thing you mentioned around the economy is probably hit the nail on the head there, because I think agility and prioritization are the only thing where my head is at. And likewise for most of leadership at Farfetch, the Farfetch group at the moment, things are moving so quickly. It is a bit of a scary world at the moment and we are trying to navigate these waters, figure out the best possible course of action and responding kind to still what we have, which is a huge customer base that are very hungry for things, but their requirements are rapidly evolving, so we need to figure out how to match that and get ahead of it.

Daniel Jester:

So, leaning on data to really probably prioritize, right? I'd imagine that the immense data machine that Farfetch has is like using that information, anything you can find to figure out what your priorities are from a creative standpoint for the next year.

Charlotte Cole:

Exactly, ROI.

Daniel Jester:

Lauren, same question.

Lauren Stefaniak:

Yeah, I think it's similar, right? Retail's really tough right now, and I think we have many things converging. One, we're about to enter a recession or we're already starting to feel that. So, with that, people are less inclined to buy things during arguably our most important time, holiday. That, plus we've essentially been asleep or just treading water for the last few years, just trying to make it work in whatever way we can. And as we're coming out of the quarantine pandemic, we're seeing customer behavior is so different than it was before. They're hungrier, they want to shop different ways, they want to be served content in different ways than we've ever seen before. So, it's managing the headwinds and tailwinds of customer, the economy, and making it work for a business to keep it afloat.

Daniel Jester:

Absolutely. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I think obviously the economy's on everybody's mind and it's going to become around prioritization. It's going to become around where can we get the most sort of bang for our buck. And we didn't touch on it, and I'm going to put a couple of bullet points out there for a future episode, but some things that we wanted to touch on that I would love for the two of you, Lauren and Charlotte, to think about, and our audience to think about as well, how does technology play a role in personalization, regionalization, that sort of thing? We can get into the specifics of how does metadata factor into this. I know I have a high level sense of how dam systems play into this, but it really is sort of orchestration of technology, of multiple pieces of technology that feed into this that I think is interesting to think about.

And how will this force us to evolve our content production? I think for one thing, Charlotte and I know this from my time at Farfetch, is having regional studios is definitely one way to go. And there's probably a way to homogenize them from a technology standpoint, but allow them to be on brand and culturally relevant for where they're operating. But with that being said, Charlotte, thank you so much for your time and for coming on the podcast. I was blown away by your session in Barcelona. And as Lauren can tell you, that's how I horn waggle people into the podcast, is I flatter them about how smart they are, which is, I mean, it's true, but it's also a tool that I use. And Lauren, thank you so much for being my first ever guest co-host. You did a fantastic job and I hope we get a chance to do it again soon.

Lauren Stefaniak:

Thank you. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me.

Charlotte Cole:

This is so much fun. Thank you so much.

Daniel Jester:

That's it for today's episode. Many thanks to our guest, Charlotte Cole, and our guest co-host, Lauren Stefaniak Smith. Thank you so much for taking the time to help me have this conversation with Charlotte and contribute your own thoughts and experiences, and not to mention, thanks to you, the audience, for listening. The show is produced by Creative Force, edited by Calvin Lanz. A special thanks to Sean O'Meara. I'm your host, Daniel Jester. Until next time, my friends.

Hi, Ian. By the way, if this intro is awkward, Charlotte, we're leaving it in because this is our chance to pay you back for Mexican week on Bake Off. So, just so that you know.

Charlotte Cole:

Oh my God, I'm so glad you brought it up. If we were going to do something as catastrophic as Mexican week, I'm glad we did it in pastry forms so you can see how truly stupid we are.

Daniel Jester:

What didn't get enough credit for me... Mexican week was bad. What was so not bad, but so strange to me was the following week, listening to Paul Hollywood describe to the viewers of the show what a s'more was and coming up with rules around s'mores that I've never heard of, and I've been eating s'mores my entire life.

Charlotte Cole:

Oh my God. This is what we do. Look, Britain has a long history of, let's say either virtually or physically going places, and then making it worse. So, we just decided to do that with a s'more.