Aje CEO Adrian Norris talks digital initiatives during COVID-19.
I think we’ve all being using the word 'pivot’ in the last few months.
As a retailer if you didn’t have a healthy digital, social or general online presence before, it's going to be really challenging to find this relevancy during COVID.
I've always said to my team it's about maintaining authenticity through everything that we do – whether that's digital campaigns, product, all of our projects – we must remain authentic, staying true to what the consumer can expect from us at Aje.
We have looked at a lot of ways in which we can communicate with the customer to suit them best, especially if they can't go into stores - but that’s our approach for good business, always evolve and being as tenacious and agile as possible.
So, we're doing a lot more VIP over the phone personal shopping.
It's more about a personal clienteling and our staff can do that from home through their own work phones, where they talk to their customers and let them know about new collections.
Or if one of their VIPs sees something online they can call up their local manager directly and they can be talked through the collection that way.
Then they can either purchase it online or our staff can also pack things up and ship them out if they wanted to go into store to do it, but a lot of it is about the service and then working out how to deliver it through our online portal or through our customer service portal.
We have rolled out a few other initiatives too.
We held our house sale online for the first time which was really successful but apart from that we just keep on telling the story that we've always told.
I think for us, it is about taking it as it comes and trying to be as strong as possible from a business perspective so we can survive at the end to come out stronger.