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Q&A with…
Q&A with… B
efore joining the Snow+Rock group, David Kohn held a number of strategy, commercial and ecommerce leadership
roles at WHSmith Travel, Blacks
Leisure Group and book stores Borders UK and Waterstone’s. At Snow+Rock, he’s head of multichannel and juggles his time between the group’s three brands: Snow+Rock, RunnersNeed and CycleSurgery.
With 24 stores, a catalogue and online operation, what are the greatest multichannel challenges you face? At Snow+Rock all parts of the operation work in harness with each other. For example, our inventory system allows us to offer stock that is in any store to customers in any other store or online. This means that stores frequently pick stock for customers who are elsewhere in the business. Going the other way, we’ve recently introduced an in-store service whereby customers may order any product in the business for home delivery. These orders are fulfilled by the online operation. And one of our biggest initiatives this year is the introduction of click and collect, whereby orders placed online will be available for collection in-store. We’ll also be offering customers a store stock- availability checker, where they can check whether an item is in-store before visiting.
How important is the print catalogue to Snow+Rock? There is a lot of evidence that customers who use all three channels—in-store, online and print—on the whole spend the most money with retailers. Print catalogues will continue to play an important role in Snow+Rock’s marketing strategy, although the nature of the catalogues and mode of distribution is likely to change. We are likely to issue smaller catalogues more frequently, prompting customers to visit online or in-store. Rest assured, however, that we’ll still continue to issue our comprehensive Winter Snowsports catalogue, which our customers love and which for many people marks the start of the winter season proper.
Tell us about your social- media strategy. How does it contribute to the bottom line? Social media is something we’re looking to develop more in the next six months. We
David Kohn of Snow+Rock
countries and see this side of our business expanding rapidly in the coming years. Europe is the most fertile territory and we expect to have an internationalised euro version of our site by early 2013.
Which would you say is your fastest growing sales channel, and why?
Online is by some distance the fastest growing channel within the Snow+Rock group. We’ve invested in our website functionality, increased the budgets for online marketing, mounted some great value promotions and tried throughout to deliver great service to our customers. All of these have helped us achieve rapid growth in 2011/12.
have a presence for all three brands on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ and a decent number of followers. We see our store and head office people as a big potential asset in social media; pretty much each one of us is a participant in snow sports, cycling or running—and sometimes all of the above—and we see our people’s knowledge of the product and passion for the activity as a great basis for engaging with our customers. We’ll be using our people to populate product ratings and reviews, badged up as expert reviews, when we launch this new initiative in summer 2012.
We saw you have a mobile website. Have you noticed any interesting trends in mobile user behaviour? We launched a mobile version of Snow+Rock at the end of September 2011 and CycleSurgery in October. We feed the mobile version of the site to phones, but tablet users are directed to our standard desktop site. Mobile phones now account for about 10 percent of our website traffic but a significantly lower percentage of our sales. We find a large proportion of our mobile customers use the site to find a local store. We’ll be introducing ratings and reviews to our mobile sites in the summer and expect many customers to use these when shopping in-store.
Planning any international ecommerce expansion? We already ship to a large number of
Direct Commerce | Catalogue e-business |
www.catalog-biz.com David Kohn
Coming soon to Snow+Rock: ratings and reviews
Whom in the business world do you most admire and why? Jeff Bezos may be attempting to take over the world, but you have to admire his single- minded vision to create the best internet retailer, indeed the best retailer, in the world. When he started it was by no means obvious that Amazon would succeed but he never wavered from his vision. Amazon Marketplace is a genius idea, the Kindle is remarkable, the Amazon cloud is the most powerful in the world; is there anything they can’t do?
What was the latest online purchase you made?
The standard answer to this question is to pick one of your own bestselling products and claim you recently purchased it. In my case, however, I will have to admit that it was a book that I should have read years ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto, from Amazon Marketplace.
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