On the first Inside Retail episode of 2023, Grace sits down with Colette Hilton, PUMA Group’s Head of Retail and Ecom UKI about how the company is thriving despite the forces of a challenging economy where both shoppers and brands alike are feeling the effects of the cost of living crisis.

For someone who plays football in her spare time, winding up at PUMA, shoe home to such superstars as Neymar, Antoine Griezmann, Olivier Giroud and Christian Pulisic, may have seemed pre-ordained, but retail as been in Colette’s veins from the beginning.

Starting out as a sales associate at 16, she quickly took to rearranging the store windows for maximum sales impact, a daring move that must have worked as she was running the store on weekends soon after. Her career really took off in earnest though when, after studying fashion buying at university, landed her first job at Ralph Lauren, describing herself as “the real life Rachel Green.” Her manager there eventually made her way to PUMA and the rest is history.

PUMA didn’t become one of the world’s most iconic brands by playing it safe though. Taking cues from it’s “Forever Faster” mission statement, Colette’s goal is to provide their customers with the right product in the right place in terms of design, pricing, and distribution, whether that is online or in-store.

We’re proud that EDITED’s SaaS solutions play an important supporting role in PUMA’s continued success and this candid and quick conversation is a great primer for how a global retailer like PUMA harnesses the power of technology to compete in the 21dst century omni-channel world.

Notable Quotable: “It’s going to be all about increasing the average order value, so increasing that basket size because it doesn’t just deliver higher revenues, but it also saves on a lot of operational costs in the back end of our business.I think the final and the most important one is increasing the amount of returning customers we have shopping on our website. So, I think it’s becoming a buzzword of 2023, it’s customer lifetime value. So, it’s really increasing the brand loyalty and the repeat purchases.”

Get in touch now to take the guesswork out of planning, pricing and phasing assortments for your category using the power of EDITED’s SaaS connected Cloud Commerce Platform.