How A.P.C. and Rag & Bone are stepping up their digital presence in Aus

e on such a roll.  Inside Retail: What did A.P.C. and Rag & Bone’s digital offering look like in Australia in the past?  Douglas Low: It was a global offering, so you were either purchasing things from Paris or New York, and then they were shipped to you. But the way we see it is you need to have one seamless experience. Obviously, an in-store customer is a digital customer, and the digital customer is an in-store customer. But in the past, it was a lot harder to market to A.P.C. and Rag & Bone customers. Now, we can draw them back in, we can showcase the products, and it’s not confusing for them.  In the past, Rag & Bone would do offers that we weren’t doing, so people would come in, and ask if they could get 15 per cent off because they had signed up [to the website], and we would have to say ‘no’. But the customer doesn’t care about that. They just see the [name] on the door and the website and think that you’re one and the same.  At the end of the day, it’s just about giving those customers the best experience. It doesn’t matter whether it’s dot com, or bricks-and-mortar, you just want them to feel great about having that Rag & Bone or A.P.C. experience. IR: What are the biggest benefits you expect to see from localising the digital offer?  DL: Being able to communicate with customers in a seamless manner. Before, we were sending out localised EDMs, but we couldn’t link them to anything. It was almost like sending out a paper catalogue that you could flick through, but you had to come to the store to try something on. In this day and age, people want things straightaway. By the time you have to think about something, you’re probably going to do something else.  If you look at all the barriers to purchase on the sites [in the past], you were paying for shipping, you weren’t able to do click-and-collect – we’re working on that – you couldn’t return locally, nothing was in the local currency. Now, everything will be made infinitely easier, so there should be significant uplift for the digital side of the business as well. IR: When do you plan to launch the new websites?   DL: A.P.C. is set to launch this week, and Rag & Bone will probably be in Q4 of this financial year.  We’re also opening two more Rag & Bone stores in Chatswood and Doncaster. Chatswood will open in mid-March, and then Doncaster will open in late-April.  IR: Were those stores planned and delayed due to Covid, or has there been a recent increase in demand? DL: We just see an opportunity. We’re also expanding our [Incu] men’s store in The Galeries, which we only just completed in November 2020. Plus, we’re opening a new [Incu] store in Chadstone in late-March. We made some really great hires at the end of last year, and it’s given us the confidence to be able to roll out these stores despite the fact that we are still in Covid. IR: Can you tell me more about the hires you made? DL: We hired a new marketing manager, new buying manager, new creative brand manager. They are the really critical ones. There were a lot of things we knew we wanted to do, but we weren’t able to execute at the level that we wanted to, and now we’ve got this team that’s able to do that. They’ve got this drive behind them.  We’ve also just hired a new head of design for our own brand Incu Collection. He will also be a piece of the puzzle. He used to have a brand called Antipodean. He’s worked at Topshop. He used to have a brand called Blouse as well that was stocked in Selfridges and Net-A-Porter, so it’s a nice little team now.