Marcella Wartenbergh joined AWWG as Chief Executive Officer in 2019, with the goal of turning the company into a leading fashion group by unifying the three brands and growing them through a series of transformational initiatives.
AWWG operates through five key pillars: brand and product, consumer engagement, distribution enhancement, digitalization and a people first initiative. In order to successfully meet the individual goals of each key pillar, agility is crucial.
You can only unlock agility in an organization when you have a team that strongly trusts in data. In order to make decisions with speed and accuracy, you need to have benchmarks, you need to have knowledge. That’s where EDITED is important, you need data if you’re trying to move at speed within your organization
Hackett’s Rebrand: Using EDITED to Reinvigorate a Heritage Brand
A key initiative for AWWG was to re-energize the group’s heritage menswear brand, Hackett London. The brand, focused on merging traditional styles with modern cuts, had a strong foundation the group could build upon, but AWWG wanted to introduce Hackett to a new generation of consumers with an updated look and feel.
Having started with updating the logo and aesthetics of the brand, AWWG next sought to update its product assortments. Using EDITED’s market analytics data, AWWG could see which product categories were performing well across the market, and which of its own categories had grown stale or repetitive. From there, the team was able to identify how to price their new product ranges, and time product launches optimately.
The team at AWWG then needed to ensure that their products translated to the consumer across all their key sales channels. Using EDITED’s Visual Merchandising tool, they were able to establish the right cadence for their email newsletters and benchmark their marketing campaigns’ imagery, messaging and promotions against the rest of the market.
Marcella explains that “EDITED gives us instant information. In today’s climate, we need up to date information everyday. You can’t afford to wait a month. We use EDITED to study our competitors and benchmark how their collections are structured. How many product categories do they have, how many styles in each category, how many options are they offering? All of this data is available instantly.”
“EDITED plays a very important role in planning Hackett’s collections every season. Brands are always evolving, so it’s very important to us to have that data on what the competition is doing. Using this information, we’ve been able to identify and understand the opportunities in our market, and identify what categories we want to own. From a pricing perspective, we’ve been able to see what price points our competitors are sitting at, and determine where there are opportunities for us to capitalize on.” - Marcella Wartenbergh, CEO
Expanding Pepe Jeans London’s Presence
In addition to supporting AWWG’s strategy for Hackett London, the apparel group has leveraged EDITED for its initiative to expand Pepe Jeans London into specific key markets.
“You can’t grow market share without knowing what’s going on inside that region, and how your competitors have positioned themselves within that market. The brands that are relevant in France or the UK are totally different from those in Germany. Making regional tweaks is critical for success, but we can’t send our team abroad every week. We need a way to firmly understand what’s happening in that market. EDITED is a phenomenal platform to enable us to map these markets from afar, specifically when it comes to product and pricing metrics.”
Using EDITED to Create Autonomy and Build Confidence
One of the core functions EDITED serves for AWWG is to enable teams to be more autonomous and agile in their decision-making. As CEO, having a platform like EDITED allows Marcella’s teams to challenge one another, but ultimately to take action on strategies more quickly by using data. For example, teams can leverage market insights to affirm that a given brand may be increasing its prices by a certain percentage, opening up an opportunity for AWWG to grow into a new price position.
“It takes emotion out of our processes. We can reserve emotion in the fashion industry for certain outputs, but EDITED is the science my teams need to safeguard against mistakes as a business, to secure new opportunities in the market, and ensure we’re not dependent only on decision-makers who sit at the top” says Marcella.
My teams use EDITED as a newspaper. In finance, you read about industries’ financial outlooks to understand what stocks to buy and which to sell. EDITED is the newspaper of the fashion industry- we use it to understand what we should be backing, versus what we shouldn’t. It enables us to place our bets with confidence
Why AWWG Stuck with EDITED in the Face of Economic Uncertainty
“When there’s a recession or crisis and people get nervous, the first thing you start to do is cut tools and programs. When it came to EDITED, I was concerned that without it the business would ultimately suffer more without it. We would have started to have purely emotional responses to our decision making process, rather than using facts and data to guide us. I was also concerned that without EDITED, we wouldn’t have a way for people to defend their decision making with their direct teams, regional partners or even with myself.
Without access to data and insights, it takes away my team’s freedom and opportunity to learn, be agile and make decisions quickly enough to deliver us strong results.
Impact of EDITED
AWWG credits EDITED with not only being a platform that has saved hours of its team’s time, but it also prevents them from making wrong decisions, and losing out on opportunities they could otherwise capitalize on.
“Time is money. If people spend hours of their day searching for information, or wasting time because they are doubting a decision they have to make, it’s a waste for the company. What’s more, making mistakes costs a lot of money. If we over-develop styles or we enter a market at the wrong price point, in a world where prices are constantly changing, if you’re not you’re using an outdated price, you’re losing opportunity to gain margin.” Marcella Wartenbergh, CEO.
