Dear Brands, Please Stop Playing Telephone
During the pandemic, those of us at brands have been tasked with rethinking how to meet work goals with maximized calendars, travel bans, shrinking teams, and onboarding new hires all the while working from home. And yet there are teams that have managed to exceed expectations and deliver. How?! I believe it’s from streamlining workflow and opening channels of communication, which takes out-of-the-box thinking and help from technology. In the current retail environment, there is simply no time to play the same game of telephone with information where the creative message gets jumbled as we circulate it from person to person, team to team. When information travels ineffectively it threatens design integrity, overall assortments, and customer storytelling which diminishes sales and erodes brand equity.
These pain points nudge all of us at our respective brands to ask the question, “What can I do to help?” We think about answers to this question along with our immediate to-dos and lists of fires we need to put out. “Will a reorg help?” “What if we rethink the calendar cadence?” “How do I absorb all the data points?” Information is coming at us from every direction and it causes wires to get crossed. We’ve all felt it: information overload.
An Archivist is familiar with this tangle of information- I lived it for over 11 years overseeing the Archive for a Fortune 500 luxury brand. It’s an Archivist’s job to curate what’s important and remove what’s not. I’ve seen first-hand how vital correct up-to-date information can be to empower a brand’s story by eliminating the noise. I’ve also acquired a unique vantage point viewing brand-life through the lens of an Information Science background. My training has me convinced there’s a clear path for retail brands to disrupt their approach to product lifecycle management by integrating standards and practices pulled directly from the Archive. The key is to capture institutional brand knowledge during the product lifecycle, quickly and in real-time, without unnecessary fuss.
Let’s think about this idea of sharing institutional knowledge together using brand collaborations as an example. How would you rate your team’s ability to quickly and efficiently package the team’s creative contents and workflow to share with a partner brand? When successful, collaborations celebrate two brands at once in a product that is new, unique, and potentially lucrative. But collaborations are also a time when a brand’s workflow and functions, or lack thereof, are on full display for an external partner. What methods would (or have) you used? As the past owner of a heritage brand Archive, I’ve stooped so low as to share the entire contents of the Archive via a thumb-drive. I thought to myself there has to be a better way to inspire, and for external and internal partners to experience what my team (and brand) had to contribute beyond a file tree of digital files on a device purchased from an office supply store…
If the behind-the-scenes workflow at your brand is severely disconnected from the immersive luxury brand story you create in-stores, a tool I adopted at my brand can help you. It’s a digital storytelling platform developed by a NY Times-funded startup called Enwoven. The platform has moved out of the Archive and into departments like Merchandising, Design, Marketing, and Communications. Every team along the product life cycle benefits from having a centralized hub that Enwoven provides, which is why I’m currently leading Enwoven’s business solutions for retail brands. The problem is real, and the problem is pervasive across the industry. Forward-thinking folks at brands just like yours are getting their feet wet using Enwoven, and they’re liking what they’ve found:
A greater focus on their product assortment and alignment with creative vision and concepts.
Instant cost-savings as redundant work and searching are eliminated.
An evolution of the product lifecycle into a creative conversation that is intuitive, transparent, and collaborative.
Quick access to insights that were previously unavailable to celebrate achievements and hindsight failures.
Please get in touch if the benefits above sound enticing, I’d be excited to show you Enwoven’s unique solution to this problem, and help you stop playing telephone with your brand’s creative information for good.
