Guest Ann-Marie Clendenin on How COVID-19 is Transforming the Retail Customer Experience

SHOW NOTES

About Today's Episode
What would it take for you to go to a brick and mortar, say clothing store. Would you browse through the clothes on the hangars? Would you try stuff on? Stuff that other people might have tried on? And what would THAT be like? In a small change room that someone else had just left? Being all breath-y and everything? While a year ago you may not have given it a thought, today, it might set off all kinds of alarm bells for you. What we look for in a retail experience is fully, and perhaps forever, transformed. These are historic times.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:

* What brands need to do TODAY to stay competitive in the new post COVID-19 economy.
* What does the future of retailing look like?
* The key approach that's allowing retailers to deepen their relationship with their customers.

Today's Guest
Ann-Marie Clendenin is a top leader of some of N. America's most iconic brands, with a solid track record for driving massive retail growth globally through traditional expansion, as well as Omni channel (which basically means connecting meaningfully with your customers on every channel possible – brick and mortar, online, social, heck – graffiti on the side of a wall if that's how your customers want to communicate). Ann-Marie's career spans 30 years, and if anyone is poised to think retail, outside of the box, it's our guest today.
Ann-Marie's leadership extends to The Limited, Ann Taylor, Aeropostale and most recently, holding executive roles as Global Head of Retail and eCommerce Operations for Kate Spade and President US Retail for Aritzia.
At Kate Spade, Ann-Marie drove physical store expansion, tripling the business from 68 stores to 225 stores in North America and from 445 to 680 stores internationally, while scaling volume from $300M to $2.1B.
With responsibility for 3 brands and 6 channels in Kate Spade, Jack Spade and Kate Spade Saturday, she Architected and drove a 13 pronged Omni Channel Solution with more than $350M in sales.
Ann-Marie is also an expert on "clientelling" – which is kind of like how it sounds. Rather than subjecting your "customer" to individual transactions, clientelling is about creating retail clients, which means a much more profound relationship than the individual, and often forgettable, transaction at the cash register, and the result is lifelong brand relationships and phenomenal, individualized customer experiences. You can just imagine that this is a disruptive force in traditional retail. So who better to re-envision and disrupt retail today than someone who's been doing it for 30 years.
For Further Listening on the Importance of Brand Reputation
Click here to listen to my interview with Stephen Hahn-Griffiths from The Reputation Institute on the importance of safeguarding the Brand Reputation.

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