Hong Kong-based Bluebell has been bringing high quality fashion brands to the region since 1954. The company is a retail distributor of over 50 brands—including Carven, Moschino, Jimmy Choo and Davidoff—across six countries within the region.
Like many traditional luxury retailers, Bluebell focuses on exclusive quality services for shoppers at their retail stores. But changes in the habits of luxury shoppers is driving the company to expand its distributorship from the offline space towards the online world.
“The world is different. There’s still business in offline retailing for fashion, because it’s not a rational purchase decision,” said Marc Ardisson, group digital director of Bluebell. “But we need to know where we are going in the next 10 years. It’s going to be a mix of online and offline and we need to be prepared for those challenges.”
ntegrating online and offline channels Ardisson joined Bluebell two years ago and started to develop the group’s digital business strategy. Bluebell targets online shoppers who prefer to buy from local websites, which provides local languages, currencies and logistics services.
“If shoppers wanted to buy from global suppliers, they would have already purchased from global retailers like Net-a-Porter or Asos,” he said. “We are providing better services which integrate online and offline channels.”
Bluebell’s online retail services leverage the company’s offline retail business by offering free delivery and return, and also allowing shoppers to return items at the physical store. The firm plans to include in-store pick up service by end-2013.
“That’s my only advantage over the global online stores,” said Ardisson, “they’ll never have a store to deal with product-exchanges.”
On top of developing localized online retail channels for brands, Bluebell also provides digital marketing consulting and management services. The company is currently running nine online stores—eight serve different Asian markets while one serves the UK market—and managing the e-marketing strategy for 12 brands. All these developments were completed within two years, and Ardisson attributes that success to technology maturity.
E-commerce flexibility and functionalities
“Technology is no longer a problem,” he said. Building the first online store took six months: the first four months were spent on deciding the business processes required to support different customers’ requirements, while the last two months were spent coding and testing.
“For example, a mainland Chinese guy is browsing a [China] e-commerce site in English and wants the product to be shipped to Hong Kong,” said Ardisson. “Shoppers these days travel a lot—they might have addresses in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong and want to use the same payment account. But we may not have distributorship in all these countries, so we have to share the same customers [with other distributors].”
Ardisson said that the majority of time was spent on working with brand owners and their online distributors to establish business processes, and agreements on customer data ownership and revenue sharing. “I am not an ‘IT guy’,” he said, “but I know what needs to be done to develop the best online distribution strategy and I need to find the best tool to match my strategy.”
One tool is an e-commerce platform hosted in the cloud. Ardisson said that when choosing an e-commerce platform, flexibility and functionalities led to the decision.
Bluebell chose Magento, an e-commerce software provider owned by eBay, for its multiple software modules and its ability to integrate with other applications. “When we picked Magento, it comes with a hosting challenge,” he said. “You can easily build a monster [with Magento] and it’d run so slow that it’d kill your business.”
Performance an issue with integration
Ardisson said that performance becomes a major issue when multiple elements and software are integrated with the e-commerce platform, thus finding a good hosting partner is essential. Through recommendations from Magento and after talking to local hosting partners, Bluebell decided on Rackspace Hong Kong, who currently hosts its Asia and European online stores.
Rackspace is a partner of Magento and its global presence is another advantage. “We were worried about the speed and performance for our UK Web site hosting in Hong Kong,” said Ardisson. “Rackspace agreed to test the performance and migrate it to its UK datacenter if there were problems. The experience for the shoppers will be seamless, and that’s what I like.”
Through hosting its online stores in the cloud, Bluebell was also able to kickstart its digital business at a manageable cost. The company’s expenses in the first year include the US$15K annual software license fee for Magento, development fee for a Chinese provider and a CRM software provider from Japan.
“In terms of capex in the first year, it was far under US$100K,” he said. “Technology is not expensive today, especially when you are in China.”
Bridging IT and retailers
Despite developing a digital strategy for Bluebell, Ardisson does not regard himself as an IT expert.
“I know exactly where I want to go within 12 months, but I don’t know how to do that [technically],” he said. “I’m really worried when IT comes to tell me these are my requirements and they are going to build something exactly for that.”
Being business and marketing driven, Ardisson said that his requirements change constantly. Through constant communications and building trust, he developed consent with the IT team. “When we need to plug something into our retail platform, I work with the external parties,” he said. “We need IT to embrace this strategy.” A cooperative mindset is also important.
Moving forward, Ardisson has a clear road map about Bluebell’s digital strategy. “Three percent of the retail business by end of 2013 is our goal,” he said. If the digital business reaches 10 percent in 18-24 months, he said that more investment in tech will be needed.
“We need to reach 3 percent, so the organization understands there’s a real business,” he said. “When we reach 10 percent, we are a market. Then my next objective is to be the biggest market. I need to do that step by step.”
CEO Talking Shop is the Retail In Asia section devoted to interviews with brand CEOs and industry leaders.
Bluebell is the owner of RetailinAsia.