Situation Room #6: Necessity is the Mother of Invention
What do you do when a sudden situation hits you hard? Events and retail are two sectors experiencing a grave impact of the current lockdowns. Frederikke Schmidt, Founder and Creative Director of Roccamore, producing and selling comfortable and stylish high heels, has had to rethink the sales process drastically. How do you facilitate for customers to try on shoes to feel the difference under circumstances like these? Jasenko Hadzic’s Tame was ready to deliver the software to manage multiple large and small events throughout the year. Now, most physical events are canceled or are going virtual.
Read the below summary of this episode or listen to the recording here to learn how Tame has built a virtual event universe and how Roccamore has redesigned its sales process, both in practically no time, in order to thrive in this brave new world.
A situation report
Roccamore’s C2C — Crisis to Community
- A month before lockdown Roccamore was in London and Milan for fashion week — the already hectic environment prepared the brand for what was to come
- Started to engage with the audience early on, to understand their changing needs
- Altered sales process to fit the new customer needs:
1. Extended returns policy from 14 to 45 days
2. Introduced 1–2–1 sessions in-store the day after lockdown
3. Published videos to show the audience how regulations are followed within the store
4. Made online calls available to allow customers to talk directly to the brand (in Danish and English)
5. Arranged home delivery - Terror vs happy marketing — the power of a pair of glitter shoes. The below post reached an audience of 180k in four days, creating a stream of additional posts with a “shoes of the day” movement.
- ‘Breaking of the wall’ — initiating conversations and allowing space to talk about less serious things during this time helped break down a barrier between people and form a strong sense of community
- Average returning customer grew from 24% to 52%
- Important to grasp the new reality outside of the comfort of your home — you might be standing stronger but the environment outside will be hit hard
- Trial and error —make an attempt to tap into potential opportunities to adopt your service or selling streams e.g. Roccamore and Wolt had a potential partnership to deliver shoes to doors during the quieter hours when riders are available. The partnership didn’t come to fruition but there is a clear opportunity within the online distribution selling streams.
- The infrastructure of delivery and returns within the fashion space in Europe is still lagging behind compared to the US. The current climate may be a catalyst to accelerate the adoption of online distribution models for many sectors in Europe.
Tame’s 3Ps— Pivot, re-Package, re-Purpose
- The best quarter before lockdown, and all of a sudden the company came to a halt
- Financially safe due to the nature of the product — clients charged a year in advance
- The product became irrelevant — so pivoted to find relevance
- In 3 days: leveraged on existing tech and knowhow and made the product relevant to the new case — complete pivot with new product and full rebranding
- Current relevance; how can we get customers to do events through a virtual world, and stay relevant themselves in a new and changing reality
- Requests exploded from all over the world — best month yet in the year
- ‘Don’t wait it out’ — “Whenever you see a shift in the world of tech, asses the situation, tap into your product opportunity, act fast and be all in”
A recipe by Tame: How to rebrand your company in three days
Ingredients:
- Keep messaging simple
- Don't overcomplicate it
- Be ‘all in’
Method:
- Start from scratch — don’t overthink it
- Easy if you decide on the path you go in — remember you can always pivot or go back to where you started
- See it as an experiment — the crisis allows for freedom to do ‘anything’
Recruiting — have you had to reconsider due to pivoting the product?
- A strong existing team with the right skills puts you in advantage to pivot
- No need to spend time on finding new talent
- Able to move fast
Future of events: hybrid to freemium — setting the standard for a new [virtual] world
- Everyone is new to the game — nobody mastered how to run virtual events yet
- A clean slate — there is a lot of possibilities to test new ideas, run new formats and redefine events. Features hold lots of opportunities to differentiate from competitors
- Important to build tools which are flexible, and can cater to customers’ individual needs
- The future format of events — big live conferences to smaller events, shorter durations, content-heavy events, rise in the downloads of event apps is expected
- Get creative— Event managers will need to get creative about content — Pre-recordings vs live events.
- Engagement is king — keeping and monitoring engagement will be a key driver in replacing the serendipity of real human connections
- Data is the backbone — it will allow event managers to learn and understand their audiences, and track engagement.
- Be smart about time allocation — event managers to reevaluate how and where they spend their time to engage with their audience
- Freemium — important to allow users to trial and get familiar with this new concept. Tame has extended its free trial period from 7 to 14 days
- Product as the main marketing channel — use the trial period to market your product by allowing people to experience the features of your event platform
Changing consumption patterns and customer loyalty and in the COVID-19 era
Can some of these new purchasing habits remain as a sustainable
- Future of the market is still very fluid — high uncertainty about customer reaction, long term needs
- Monitoring customers closely and carefully as a means to be prepared to understand the changing patterns
- Adopting to what ‘makes sense’ in the current situation — e.g. all professionally created marketing content was swapped to homemade photos, live videos to create a sense of familiarity associated with the brand and allow community and customers to engage
- Show that you care and you will receive the same in return — listen to customers, take care of them more than ever, reply to their questions and requests, start a conversation to let them feel involved, form a community of people that can go beyond the crisis
What’s next?
- Find your relevance — know ‘why’ you are here and people who associate themselves with your why will find you
- Attendees to content creators — ambassadors help grow the company which allows saving on marketing
- Companies adopting more software to adapt product offerings
- Efficient and remote work is here to stay
Final Words
Thanks to everyone who joined us this week, we hope you are enjoying the episodes. If you have any topic suggestions or would like to participate as a panelist, please reach out to us here!
Next week for episode #7, we will be asking the Limited Partners (LPs), the ones funding the funders about the startup funding climate during COVID-19. Are VCs still investing? Are angels pulling their funds away from venture? What about corporate VCs — will their mandate be limited?
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