128: 60 Markets in 11 Months: Montblanc's Commerce Transformation Journey

[Music] Welcome to Commerce Innovators. Each week we chat with experts, customers, and innovative partners about the latest trends and real-world outcomes in agentech commerce. Tune in for actionable insights and inspiring ideas to shape your commerce future. Let's get started. Welcome everyone to Dreamforce. I have an amazing guest today. We have Marie Terese, Monastor from Mont Blanc, part of the Richmo Group. Hello Marie Terese. Yeah, hi. You know, thanks for having me in this epic moment for Salesforce. First time at Dreamforce? Yes, first time at Dreamforce. Well, so it's overwhelming and I'm really glad you have a few minutes in your tight schedule for us to record an amazing podcast. Before we start, you're a chief client and digital officer at Mont Blanc. So can you share quickly what was your story and your history and your journey becoming a CDTL? Yeah, sure. So I started actually my career in finance. No one really knows that. Hello. Yeah, six years in controlling your finance. Then I took another route and went to PBH, which is the parent company of Tommy Higanka, Evan Klein. I worked there for eight years and I was responsible for all the D2C innovations. Mainly in the retail space, retail operations, building up all that Omni-Channel business that was already in 2013. So we were quite far as a brand in that time. And then the last years of my tender day, I also was responsible for the e-commerce business for Tommy Emia. And yeah, and then after eight years, I moved to Mont Blanc. And now responsible for everything around digital e-commerce and client globally. And yeah, that means like during the e-commerce business globally and it has brought my scope from a more European scope to a global scope. And especially in the area of clients also very new to me, like running CRM client insights and all the customer relationship centers and these kind of things. Okay. So you basically execute at the forefront of the customer or consumer? Exactly. And design the seamless, personalized and connected elevated journey. Yes. And I put it that way. That's always our ambition to do that because I think at the end it's important. But also what's important is that yeah, in the space of digital, it's important that you only use digital experiences, which are really linked to your DNA, which then hopefully make your experience like very seamless on the website. Compared to the history of Mont Blanc, I would say digital is a very new thing. So you have a lot of heritage. I have the pleasure to be in your Mont Blanc house and the collection where they put together the very fine pieces. So I saw that firsthand and my question would be, what's the, or how do you strike this delicate balance between heritage history and bring that into as I just said, a seamless, personalized and connected digital. Or on the channel journey. Yeah. I think what's very important that whatever you build in the digital space really links us to the brand DNA, no matter in which industry or brand you are in. So I think that's important. So not to build something digitally for the sake of building it because you have seen it on another brand and you really liked it. So that's definitely our mantra. And then what's really important is that you are consistent, especially in luxury on every touch point, how you communicate. And for many luxury companies, especially the content creation is very important. So the storytelling. So everything around that how digital can enable to have their more and more seamless journey. That's definitely something we are looking into. And that's interesting because I'm in this space for more than 10 years now and it's a big difference if you work with a luxury player like yourself versus a fashion player. You have worked for PBH to just mention it. We have more SKUs storytelling is more probably less important than in a luxury way. But we will get to that in a second. I'm interested because you recently did a very important transformation. You went live in 60 markets in 11 months with a new common solution. And I'm interested. What were the two strategic decisions you took to make that happen because it's an impressive journey to do that 60 markets in 11 months. Yes, it is. And we are still in the middle of it, I would say, but we have swallowed the majority of the markets. Yes, so I think what's very important and you just mentioned it and actually you always want to have perfection. And I'm also a little bit of perfectionist myself. But I think at one point you need to realize that either you go live and you manage your go live to it or you shoot for perfection. And then basically you never go live in a way. So at one point we really had to decide and make very clear criteria on what's business critical and what's nice to have. So to say, I mean, the nice to have were already things we already had previously. But I think that was really important to make that distinction and then really challenged that every day again. Can we still go or do we need to say we first need to fix that before we go live. I think that was the key to make it happen and then to make everyone in the organization to understand and accept this because you want just mentioning brand and content is very important and the luxury industry. So luckily we had the buy-in of the organization and the understanding that we will fix this a visually only imperfections we will fix them step by step. But I would this clear prioritization and constantly taking that decision, which was also not easy for certain stakeholders. I think that was the key that we made it on time. Key is team. I mean, you just mentioned, I can imagine if you do it in 11 months, you also had a previous commerce instance, different solution, different technology before you move to commerce clouds. I think also motivating your team to run some your business on the current solution while moving to near stack is quite a challenge. And my question would be building those digital teams and those digital capabilities. I think it also similar to striking a balance between heritage and the modern age and the digital space. It was also important to decide what to move in house, what to build in house. Maybe that's also a question for the future and what to maybe do with partner and an agency. And I think that's always important again to look at your DNA and what really makes or breaks your customer experience. And I think everything which is really close to the customer. So if we talk about digit it's about again content, UX, UI, everything around CRM, the after sales, the call centers, these are experiences which are really closely to the customer. So you really want to kind of have a strong control on these kind of things versus when we talk more about logistics or these topics, it's easier to outsource. But also here I have to say, even if you outsource, I think it's very important to have a strong guidance and control in SLA someplace because for us as a brand, if you have a poor experience like the gift wrapping is not nice. You have a high share of gifting, many people buy them on Blom Pen to give it to someone or you have a really bad shipping experience at the end. It kind of goes back to your brand experience as a customer. So I think still even if you outsource certain things where there are experts out there in this type of fields like logistics, it's still important to have really clear framework and a clear guidance on how do you control that really and also how to measure certain KPIs. Exactly because I mean you mentioned it SLA is even if you outsource it, you have SLA is in place but to be back to your point consistency. I mean you can ensure much better consistency if you have it in house, but that goes at the expense of costs and also having a maybe an overhead that you need or do you want exactly. I have a question maybe it's a double click a little bit in a look behind the scenes because I'm also working with a lot of commerce customers at Salesforce and the trend of the last couple of years was headless, composable as a very big discussions. My question would be what's your point of view from a luxury perspective, how do you decide I go with a highly custom front and I do everything myself I connect the API's I pick a front end I like versus I go with a template approach. So again I think it's about like what it depends on your business model so if you have a lot of SKUs you have a lot of volume of a lot of data points you need very strong on site search and merchandising engines in order to have a really good seamless customer experience and also probably a lot of personalization based on the behavior so that. Customers are not overwhelmed by choice so I think it really depends on on your model and what I said for us for example personalization in terms of personalization of this nice writing instrument here is very important so you engrave a name or you can emboss something in your leather goods so. This is for us very important that we there have a certain flexibility in the text so when we build this experience online it's not so easy to build this online and to kind of really have it also again in the same kind of standard we want to have it for the brand so there we need certain flexibility but I think it really is tied to the business model you are running as a brand or as a company to look into okay like what do I really need and do I achieve this with a headless infrastructure or cannot also be more with the. I think that's important and then I think it's also about your internal teams and the internal appetite because if you build a headless infrastructure we had that the previous company we were building that yeah you need a lot of expertise on this and I think you need to have the appetite internally and the talent to do that and I think the question is is that really giving you in competitive advantage within the company. the field of your operations or of your business. I think that's what I could only recommend to everyone really look into what's important to your business, what differentiates you, and then what type of tax deck do I need in order to achieve that? There's no free lunch. I mean, if you want flexibility, it comes with a cost. Exactly. Well, this is going so I think also for our listeners who probably have that choice in front of them. Do I go headless and fully custom or do I go with a templated approach and sacrifice maybe a little bit of flexibility? I think start with the Y, I think is a very good recommendation. And at the end, it's not black and white, white and white, right? Because you can still take certain things out of more monolith structure. So I think it's not completely black and white to go, but I think it's really start and look at what do you need. I want to also do a double click on like what you mentioned earlier, global consistency. I mean, you as a strong brand and typically have a lot of luxury companies. They want to control the experience because that's what you have. Your brand is the most important asset you probably have as a brand in your legacy. My question would be 11 months, 60 markets, although 60 markets are different. You are ease different from central Europe, central Europe is different to Asia. We talked about that in a preparation and not America is another very difficult or not difficult but different market. How do you see that from a strong brand perspective and the flexibility the markets demand sometimes? Yeah. So indeed, what you said. So for us, it's key to control the luxury exorlet say the brand experience. And I think it consistently across the globe and only have localizations where it's needed or local adaptions. And you just mentioned Asia. So yeah, in the Asian market, many companies and also we have more local ambassadors like in China and Korea. They are you really needed in order to position your brand. So but it's basically every brand has that versus the Western world is more more similar, I would say. But we really control everything from central. So we are also like I said, we haven't yet migrated all the markets we have. So there's still a little bit to go but we manage all the platforms centrally, especially from a content UX UI perspective to really make sure it's a global consistent and all the content is also produced by brand. That's I think also typical for the luxury industry that the brand has a very strong, let's say, say or they decide on the content to make sure that it's consistent across all touch points. Okay. Maybe one addition on the localizations is that of course, we can also talk about local fulfillment payments and those kind of things, right? And I think their approach should always be like, yeah, look at the cost benefit. So in the past, when we started to localize, also previous company will we started first with translations and content and then currency and then payments and then lastly fulfillment on carriers because I mean, we all know that this is always a heavy implementation and it also adds again complexity to your text deck, the more you localize. So I think there's also there it's important really look into the cost benefit. Where do you need to look? What are your strategic markets where you want to grow? And maybe also consolidate and go with a few partners. I mean, we have a huge partner network in Commersklaude like globally for cross-border shipments, for example, payments, Salesforce payments drive. Exactly. Luxury is not just a digital word, it's an omnichannel word. You mentioned it earlier, the white glove experience and that has a lot to do with consistency and I think in digital channels, it's fairly easy if I may and dare to say that in front of a chief digital and client officer. But if it comes to the physical experiences, sometimes it's very tricky because I guess in 60 markets, you have to design a efficient but also at the same high expectation, high bar, white glove experience in a store. So what's key if you do not look into the digital part but rather in the people part or any other part and maybe if you can share a little bit what's key to ensure there is consistency globally in an omnichannel journey. Yeah. So like I said in the beginning, like I used to work a lot in retail on the PVH side and there for us it was really important the mindset and I see that also now. So the mindset also of the people in the stores, they need to have that mindset that the channels are belonging together at the end of a day and I think you need to make sure that the incentive schemes are rightly set to kind of foster or kind of try to emphasize a certain behavior because even if all the technology and the processes and the training, all this needs to be seamless. That's already for me a given because also experience shows if if a tool is not working properly or a process and the staff feels insecure with it and they also feel insecure to use it in front of the consumer. So that's already a given I would say. And then on the luxury side, it's again like everything on the brand image on the CI on the content we are using and the language we are using, everything needs to be streamlined across all touch points, not only on the digital side. Okay. So you're a leader at Moblon. You run a large transformation or you ran that the last couple of months we just discussed that. This typically and also also a large team. How do you motivate and how do you bring your teams on your side because I can imagine in 11 months it has been a very stressful 11 months. So what's your philosophy to steer, manage and especially in this situation motivates a team? Yes. So I think the first one is explain the why. It always starts with the why. Why are we doing this? What's your role in this? How does everything, what you do adds to the bigger picture? I think you need to really integrate them and take them on the journey because if they understand why and also shows them for the future, what kind of like this will enable us in the future. I think then it's also easier to convince people to get them on board. Then I think it's about also clear prioritization because as you said we we were still having a running business. So we were building the plane as we were flying. So how do we keep the business running plus we work on the project and there we really also had to make sure that we kind of identify the key processes on the operational side which we needed to keep the business. Let's say I wouldn't call it live but also in a good level still. So we also backfilled some of these roles temporarily so that our specialists and the experts could work on the project and really build our future on a new platform. I think that prioritization is also key. And also at one point do you stop on the old platform? I think that was also kind of painful decision. When do we stop developing there and there we also had some clear guidance. Whatever we can take with us we can still do or we have learnings we can still do but also at one point we obviously stop completely developing on the old platform. Then it's about transparency. I think it's always important to be there for them to be open to be approachable and that they can come with any concern. Whatever they have I think that's always important. My door is always open so we always have an open dialogue. Then empowerment I mean they need to feel empowered also to drive their their area of the project. I think that's very important and that at the end of a day also sometimes to put things into perspective because if you do such a project in 11 months even everyone does their best things before between the cracks things will go wrong we will miss something and that's okay. And I think that was important to tell them it's okay guys I know you do your best and they know that at the end I will always stand in front of them and defend this but we also luckily everything went quite smooth and we also had to buy enough our leadership team across the organization which also supported us and was also aware that not everything will be perfect and I think that that's key. Now that transparency and constant dialogue. Well that has been a ride. I think that was German efficiency mariteres. We covered a lot of ground so thank you for your openness. Any closing words before we head over to Dreamforce and watch the next keynote. Yeah I would like to thank my team again and everyone involved so it's not only on the Montblanc side it's also on the Rishmol side many teams helped us tremendously and supported us day and night as well as several partners so thank you everyone who was part of this journey. Great and I thank you in the name of Salesforce thank you for being a great partner and customer and I wish you a very nice first dream course. Thank you Nino looking forward to it. Thank you. Thank you for tuning into another enlightening episode of Commerce Innovators. We caught a treasure trove of remarkable discussions and insights lined up just for you in the world of Commerce Cloud. To stay in the loop and never miss a beat, be sure to rate, review and follow our podcast. Your feedback and support mean a world to us and we can't wait to happy with us for our future episodes. Until next time, stay inspired and keep innovating.