Our digital marketing strategist, Olivia Taddio met (virtually) with Ian Richards, VP CRM at Garage and Dynamite to talk about COVID-19 and the retail sector. Watch the full interview or read the transcript.
About Group Dynamite
Group Dynamite actually celebrated its 45th birthday during COVID-19, which was somewhat of a somber experience, but it was still a good time to reflect on the business. So, Group Dynamite is a Canadian retailer based in Montreal, we have two brands, two iconic brands in Canada, Garage and Dynamite Clothing. We have about 400 stores across Canada and the United States.
Group Dynamite’s Relationship with E-Commerce
Group Dynamite loves digital, we like to consider ourselves a digital retail brand and really driving towards digital but with a connected brick and mortar experience. To use a cliche word, omnichannel.
I joined the company about 12 months ago. So even prior to my joining, a lot of great initiatives have been worked on and we were quite lucky in the sense that we were well prepared for this situation. We had a lot of key projects that were already in the pipeline that couldn’t have come at a better time. For example, yesterday in Canada, we launched pay Brite, which is a buy now, pay later solution. This lets our customers get more of what she wants now and pay it off over the subsequent weeks, which, at this point in time is a fantastic solution for our customers. We also just rebuilt our mobile app. And, one of the key things we’ve done in the last few months, which has really come to fruition is what we call ship from store and endless Aisle. We have a large distribution center (DC) in Montréal. We used to traditionally ship our products from the DC but we opened up ship from store, so while the stores are closed, we’ve still been able to get access to some of the stores and keep that inventory flowing and take some of the pressure off of the DC. We’ve been doubling down on key initiatives, but our existing programs and structures have really helped us get through this situation as best we can.
Other Projects or Key Initiatives That Helped Group Dynamite Adapt to COVID-19
To help us, in the beginning, we set up daily executive huddles. So literally every morning, we had 2x 30-minute meetings, and we still have those meetings today. For our e-commerce meeting, we have a 30-minute meeting and we split into two teams, demand and supply. So obviously I was more focused on the demand side of things. But before we started really driving the demand, we really had to get our supply and operations in order because the whole process had changed the game with the stores going down.
Also, we really wanted to maintain our service level agreements (SLA) with customers, we felt if we could maintain and continue to ship stuff to the customer within a two to three day period, and we could pick up the phone and answer her questions, it would ive confidence to the customer that we’re going to get his stuff to them in a fast and safe and secure manner. Then, we could continue to grow the business. The first few weeks were really around the supply and operational side. There’s a lot of work that went on with all of the stores and the DC and lots of planning around that and inventory allocation. And then from there, we went back to the demand side.
So again, we asked ourselves how do we start to drive the demand? What’s really interesting is that people are at home, they’re worried about their jobs, and it’s important to share the right content to our customers. So again, we had a whole marketing team focused on rethinking the content, making it more relevant to stay at home. We launched some channels like TikTok with Bloom. We also launched Pinterest on Dynamite. Plus, we really started to think differently about our paid media strategy with a big focus on acquisition. So the great news for us is, you know, even during this difficult time, we’ve managed to attract not only you know, our existing customers and continue to serve their needs, but we’ve also been able to attract new customers to Garage and Dynamite, which has been fantastic.
Customer Experience and Stores Reopening
As thrilled as we are with the ecommerce right now. We’re obviously more thrilled to start opening the stores again. We have currently 20 of our 400 stores open and more stores are planned to reopen in the coming weeks. Our focus, again, is really on making sure that the opening of the stores is a very branded and fun experience. Yes, of course, we’re going to make sure that it’s secure and safe. But we just want our customers to come in and enjoy, you know, shopping and get away from the stresses of COVID-19. But all of this should be done in a very safe and secure environment, both for our employees and our staff.
That being said, we’ve also taken this opportunity to rethink the role of the store associate. The traffic might be down, you know, over the next six to 12 months while this pandemic plays out. So how do you take that lower traffic and increase your conversion to offset that? We’re also looking at the relationship again, between digital, and brick and mortar to make sure that our store associates have access to all of our rich customer data.
We have a fantastic loyalty program that we launched in 2017. We have over 2 million members, and we actually just launched our CDP with Optimove which is a customer data platform. We have all this rich customer data, we know their shopping preferences, their sizes, we know what they’ve been browsing on the Internet. We want to be able to give this information to the associates through client telling through an application where they can better serve the customers needs, they could reach out, text, email, call the client and start to look at things like booking an appointment. Our clients could find a time to come into the store again and have your own kind of personalized shopping experience again in a safe and secure manner. We could start to really deepen our relationships between our customers, the product, and the brand. We see our store associates being an extension of our brand experience. We’re really looking to connect that experience between the customer and the associate in a meaningful way.
Bloom x Group Dynamite
Just while I’m here, I just want to give a big shout out to team Bloom. You guys have been good partners now for the last year, almost a year, and a big part of our success. You know, over the last few months, we’ve really started to improve our offerings through paid media and SEO. So big thank you to your team. I know we’re keeping you guys busy, but we really appreciate it, and we look forward to continue to work with you guys.
We’d like to thank Ian Richards and Group Dynamite for this very interesting chat. If you are looking for a digital marketing partner to help you navigate the COVID crisis, reach out to us here.