It's International Women's Day and Ragtrader is celebrating the key women who make up Australia's fashion industry. In this extract from our print edition last year, we learn how Camilla is pushing into global markets.
Camilla Franks has always had the ambition to establish her brand as a global entity, ever since she took her first tentative steps into overseas markets through wholesale. Now, the kaftan queen has capitalised on the US market in all three channels - online, in store, and wholesale - with other wholesale and online accounts across Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia.
Camilla's former CEO Jane McNally says this is just the beginning. Thanks to the recent investment by Tattarang, she says the brand can accelerate what it has been doing much more quickly. This includes more stores across the USA, establishing new markets elsewhere in all channels, and signing on tech-based solutions towards localisation.
McNally says the brand has recently signed leases to open two additional stores in the US in FY24, in both Miami and New Jersey, and are actively scouting for further opportunities.
“We continue to pursue international digital acquisition through more seasonally tailored content and advertising campaigns,” McNally says. “In the next two months, we will add selected local currency and payment methods for main markets beyond the US, UK, and Europe.
“Selected site language translation will follow in early 2024.”
According to McNally, Camilla ships to around 55 different countries, with multiple technology solutions towards localisation in the pipeline. This includes radio-frequency identification to increase inventory accuracy, a new customer data platform to enhance communication, product information management to help provide effective localised product information to customers in different geographies, and clienteling software to improve the in-store experience in conjunction with the digital experience, which is expected to be complete by early FY25.
“We are targeting global expansion through all channels, with the United States being our primary market target, followed by Europe and the Middle East,” McNally says.
McNally says Camilla already has a large social following globally, driven by fresh content and new categories, as well as large-scale collaborations such as being the stylist for Robbie Williams’ recent world tour and appearing in Netflix special The White Lotus.
Camilla has half a million followers on Facebook, nearly half a million on Instagram, and 27,000 followers on LinkedIn. McNally says its Instagram account saw an annual growth rate exceeding 10% in the last 12 months and a gain of almost 50,000 new followers.
“When you consider all that richness of content that we've got, actually joining our transactional website with that social content more quickly is going to be important over the next few years,” McNally says.
According to McNally, Camilla’s online portals are a major investment area for Camilla. Recently, the company added shoppable video, along with pick & dispatch and click & collect.
McNally says the shoppable videos attract over 15,000 viewers regularly, with a 10% conversion rate.
“There is direct conversion when the video goes live, but we are also finding people are then watching the archive videos of past collections and still converting up to three months post launch date,” she says. “As well as direct conversion via shoppable, we have also had very positive feedback from customers who are going into store after watching and telling us they are getting new ideas on how to style and upstyle their existing wardrobe.”
The major investment into its online portals is not despite the swift return of customers to the physical store environment, which McNally says has picked up over the last six months.
“Our customers typically will spend over 60 minutes in store, where we can style them and show them how to wear it. Translating more of that physical experience online as well, and having the technologies to do that, is going to be really important.”
Another area of acceleration for Camilla, according to McNally, is in its loyalty program, via the way it speaks to its customers.
“Currently, we reward loyalty amongst our very top tier of customers, but we would love to extend the surprise and delight factor throughout our customer base,” she says. “Customers in our existing loyalty program are treated to bespoke invitations to personal events, early access to pre-order new collections, and additional surprise and delight experiences.”
McNally says Camilla is considering moving to a system which allows customers to access their personal online profile to provide them with real-time information.
“The treatment that we give those customers is quite a manual treatment, whereas I think what we want to look at is - via automation and technology - actually being able to understand the next tiers down so that we can extend a more personal approach to those customers.”
These technological strategies, according to McNally, round off the company’s overall omnichannel proposition. She says it also proved to be a new customer acquisition tool, driving a 37% new customer mix.
“We know that customers who are omnichannel customers, they actually spend three times as much as our single channel customers,” McNally reveals. “So the more customers that we can pull into that pool, the better.”