How does a 150-year-old high street retailer compete against an avalanche of digital-first competitors? For John Lewis, part of the answer was to think like the startups trying to steal its customers.
"We've tried to build a fail fast culture and new ways of working," said Claire Rousseau, a leader of the retailer’s ongoing strategy to adopt more of a startup mentality. "We're actually quite a traditional and conservative organisation - and that's understandable given how successful we've been at what we do." But even the most established of incumbents is realising the need to change.
Rousseau joined John Lewis 13 years ago. Coming from a strategy and consultancy background, she immediately set about understanding what the retailer’s customers felt was missing. "We needed to work out what customers wanted from us," she told the audience at WIRED Retail 2016.
"We've got a really loyal and affluent customer base and we really appreciate those customers. But when we ask you what you want, you go: ‘Anything, I love you guys.’ It's really unhelpful." So Rousseau and her team adopted a different approach.
"We tried to look at what the world is going to look like in ten years time," she explained. Taking these predictions, and combining them with insight from customers, John Lewis started to build a new strategy for its digital growth. "We decided the future for us is not opening more stores under a new brand,” Rousseau said. Instead, her team identified new digital propositions that could be blended into the existing business to improve it.
Then, as with many traditional businesses, John Lewis created a small, nimble team to test out these ideas separate from the rest of the company. Even an incumbent, John Lewis has been around for a while. Its first store opened on Oxford Street in London in 1864 and its slogan, "Never Knowingly Undersold" has been used since 1925. The John Lewis partnership, which comprises of John Lewis and Waitrose, now employs 88,900 permanent staff in 48 department stores and 350 Waitrose supermarkets. The entire business has annual gross sales of more than £11 billion.
John Lewis typically spends six to 12 months developing a new product, but Rousseau‘s team works rather more quickly. "We've embraced the startup mentality and given ourselves a deadline of three months." One of the first projects, a digital magazine running on WordPress, is already being tested by 5,000 customers. Progress is slow by startup standards, and that’s a good thing according to Rousseau.
"I see this very much as a journey over several years. We have a far-reaching strategy that goes out to 2028. It's a cultural journey, but ultimately we are a special place and we like our culture. So it's an evolution rather than anything else."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
