From Data to Discovery: Anthropologie’s Secret to Retail Success with CMO Elizabeth Preis | Podcast

Nice to be here, Matt. Thanks for having me.

Typically I'm in Philadelphia, but right today I'm in New York City.

Great. So Anthropologie is a brand of 30 years young. We have many loyal customers. That's actually something that was surprising to me when I first joined, just how much brand love already exists with the brand. As a marketer, you can't ask for anything better — you're working with a brand that already has this intrinsic joy that people find every time they walk into a store and every time they go onto the site. Since I've joined about five years ago, one of the things we've done as a team is really make sure that we can amplify that love in many different ways. We amplify that love online, on our social platforms, and through our store experience. It's exciting to see so many customers discover our brand in stores, and now more and more they're discovering our brands online. As a result, we've opened some great stores. We're in a mode right now — we've opened some stores this year, and we're opening some even this fourth quarter getting ready for the holiday season, bringing more brand love in an IRL experience as well.

They come to just be surprised, delighted, and they come for a sense of discovery. If I had a nickel for every time I hear from a customer 'I had no idea you carried that, I had no idea I could find that, it's my favorite thing and I never thought I would find it at Anthropologie' — it truly brings joy in some of the smallest things and some of the biggest moments in your life, whether it's a new mug to have your morning tea with or your wedding dress where you walk down the aisle. That's the magic of Anthropologie, frankly, because it can actually meet so many of your needs and your wants in life.

That's a great question. Even though we might span multiple different categories, the intrinsic value proposition that we're offering the customer is consistent: we want to offer great quality, great style, and a great experience they can't find anywhere else. Often that means they find product they can't find anywhere else. People don't always realize this, but we have a huge team of designers that create things in-house, and the vast assortment of what we offer our customer is products designed in-house and offered only through Anthropologie. That's what sets us apart. We have a unique style, a unique range of styles that can meet what you might need for an everyday as well as what you might want for a special day in your life, whether it's what you're wearing, how you're entertaining, or how you're sharing time with family and friends.

Well, I obviously speak to the Urban Outfitters team, and I can't speak to all their strategies in fine detail. But what I can say is that as a group of brands, we prioritize creativity at the heart and soul of what we stand for. Every one of our brands — whether it be Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie, Terrain, or Nuuly — we are all driven by creativity in multiple different ways. Creativity in terms of how we show up to our customer in ways that you may not even imagine outside of these brands, and also we want to inspire creativity in our actual consumer. How can they be creative in their own ways in terms of how they live, how they dress, how they put things together? We want to inspire that same level of creativity and discovery with our customers.

The area where we've really had some great learnings and that we continuously try to push each other on is that Anthropologie has often been a brand where people have a sense of pride — saying 'I've got this great dress, I got it at Anthropologie.' There's a sense of pride and you can feel the emotion coming out of the person when they tell you, whether it could be a special dinner party, date night, or taking the kids to school for the first day. We've owned that special occasion space for a long time with our customer. But in real life today there has been a casualization in how people actually live their lives.

And how can we, with less people necessarily dressing up the way they used to, how can we still be that preferred place where they find product to make their everyday more like a special day? That's been an area that we've collectively worked on between our product team, our creative team, the models we choose, the media we use — all of that is to make sure we're showing up in places that are more relevant to how customers live today. I say a lot with the team: having great product and having great content — when I say content I mean creative — if you don't have it in front of the customers in the right places for relevancy and with enough frequency, we're missing the mark.

In our world we're thinking about how do we make sure that we are owning more of that screen share. Where is that customer today? More often than not they're on their screen, they're not sitting in front of a television the way they used to. How do we own more screen share? How do we then create more mind share from that screen share? How do we let that evolve into more heart share emotionally, and then how does that eventually turn into wallet share? If we think about it in that evolution, we're constantly focused on how is the customer spending their time today and how do I make sure that Anthropologie is showing up relevantly, appropriately, and with enough frequency to actually cut through.

Absolutely. We have brand ambassadors who we work with on a regular basis, usually for a period of time, and they basically become like another extension of our brand associates. Then they have a group of followers themselves, their community, and they can speak to our products against their community. We also work with influencers on very dedicated programs — like a dress campaign or a sports campaign, whatever that campaign might be from a product priority perspective. We try to find relevant ambassadors and relevant influencers who can help share our story with their followers. There's an important element here, which is: people inherently trust people before they trust brands. People will trust who they think they know, even if that influencer may not have been anyone they've ever met personally. They feel they have a commonality with them, a connection, and there's a trust factor. And once you establish that trust factor, then your message can actually have a much stronger platform and a much easier way to ring true.

And I think the other thing that's also part of this is that in today's media world, that conversation is not one way. That conversation invites you to be part of it through liking, engaging, sharing, commenting — and that did not exist before the social platforms came to be. Community is something that's obviously being built on these platforms, but the inclusivity of that community, that people want to hear from their community and hear back from their community, is also a very important element of what has helped us evolve and think about these as very viable media platforms in which we need to make sure that our content is relevant. But that's a lot of work.

Absolutely. And I think it's part of an overall recipe. I don't think any one of these things is the silver bullet where you put all your eggs in that one basket. You need an approach that's like a portfolio. With everything you do, what is that portfolio approach, what is the media mix you want to use? And throughout that whole mix, the message needs to still be consistent — it's just the articulation of that message might change a little bit. For us, that message is: we bring joy. We bring joy not only on your special days but we want to bring joy on your everyday. We want to bring joy when you're making your morning coffee, your morning tea. We want to bring joy obviously when you're walking down the aisle. But we want to play in more joy on more days than not, because if we can own more joy and own more share of joy, then we will be the destination where people want to spend their time — for functional needs, operational needs, getting gifts. We want that to be something they look forward to.

I think it started before COVID, to be honest. In a very highly professional work environment, it's been a long time since people have been wearing ties. They might still be wearing a suit, but they weren't wearing a tie. Now they're not really even wearing a suit — they're wearing maybe a jacket and slacks. Now they're sort of not even wearing the jacket any longer; now it's like a shirt and a puffer. That's sort of the evolution in a more formal professional workplace. But I think the casualization has been happening for a while, and I don't think that's necessarily bad. It's just the way people's styles evolve and society evolves. The positive side of that is that there's a lot of casualization happening also in the entertaining space that is much more inclusive. In the old ways you'd have a formal dinner party and everyone would be dressed up, everything served formally on full dinner plates with full service. And now it's 'bring the kids over, let's all have a casual Friday evening pizza party.' The way we entertain and live is very different from what it might have been several years ago. I don't think either is bad. It just means that for us as Anthropologie, if we still want to be the destination for joy, the destination for bringing happy times to happy people, then how do we do that through our product assortment, how do we do that with how we style, how do we do that with offering inspiration throughout our channels — whether it be Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok — that actually responds to the changing and evolving way in which people live.

I mean, how do any of us do it? I feel like we're always chasing it to an extent.

I would say everyone in the company is actually bringing ideas and sharing what they've seen. I learn way more from the team who is part of my group than necessarily what I'm teaching them in many cases in this area. That's the beauty about having a very diverse and far-ranging group of people who work in an organization — because the great ideas, the great trends, and the great themes actually come from within as much as they come from without.

Oh, don't get me started on this because I might never end. This is a favorite topic. I feel exceptionally privileged to work for an organization that has such rich data. I have worked in organizations where we had our own data, and I've also worked in organizations where we had to infer data through our third-party retail partners. Having your own data is way more powerful and way more personal, and that's incredible. The first thing with data is recognizing the value across the organization. So often data sits with your analytics team, or your insights team, or your tech team, and it's actually a business driver for all teams. The level of information available and the way we use that information is the most important part. Sometimes the most complex data will just be a complex string of information, but an insight, a statement, an opportunity, and a size of the prize becomes a single statement that can actually motivate and galvanize an entire organization. That's what I try to focus on with all the great data we have. My challenge to myself and my challenge to my team is always: that's great, that's the what. The next question I'm going to ask you is: so what? And the third question after that is: what's next? All 'what' in the world doesn't mean anything unless you know what is it really saying — in terms of are we growing our customer base, are we not growing, why are we growing. Is it because we're getting more activity from our existing customers, is it because we're bringing in new customers? All of those questions need to be answered, but they need to be answered in a simple way that the entire organization can understand them, not just the data scientists. Because I think if the data only sits with the data scientists, you end up not fully leveraging the power of that data for motivating and building a business.

Absolutely. We love AI. AI is an absolutely powerful tool and it can actually enhance one's creativity, not replace one's creativity. It can enhance all the designers, not replace our designers. We all look at it as a way to augment the great, amazing talent we already have on our teams — whether it be in the copy and editorial team, the search marketing team, the social media team, or the design team. It's all an enhancement and it's another tool that allows us to be our most creative possible.

I would say something like this: it's a new way of thinking about design and your workflows, effectively. The tone needs to be consistent at the top, and our CEO is very supportive of AI, very supportive of creativity in general, and that this is a way we can enhance our own people to be more creative. Great — little known fact, but I'm going to tell you right now: all of our holiday windows, which are all sort of made out of yarn and they're fantastical Christmas trees and winter skates and truly amazing vignettes in our windows — they were all initially inspired by AI.

Did AI generate our windows? No. But did they spark a creativity that was then enhanced way beyond what AI could have ever delivered? The creativity that our team — our amazingly creative visual team, our Chief Creative Officer, all the visual merchants, all the visual designers, and all the stores — could take that and run with it. They turned it into something way beyond the initial spark. They turned it into seeing knitted Vespas in store and knitted gondolas in store. They turned it into way beyond whatever could have been created initially with AI. Just having the conviction of allowing these tools to actually help you be better in your job — I think that is our responsibility as marketers. It's embracing new technologies to allow our own creativity to shine even further.

And remember, it's not like it just starts from zero. You have to feed information — it's a feedback loop. You're constantly in this feedback loop of evolving and making it where fantasy becomes reality. When you walk into our doors this holiday season — or online, but especially in our doors — you will see on the windows our campaign, our holiday campaign, which we call 'Anthro Magic,' because that is truly what we deliver. We don't just deliver gifts — we deliver that Anthro Magic. And that magic is what you can see both inside the store and it's an element of magic, if you will, integrated with our own creativity and genius of making the experience of our stores unlike anything else out there.

Well, look, in the US especially, this Black Friday through Cyber Monday week is a huge event. Many retailers actually lean into it even more, taking it beyond just seven, eight, nine, ten days — they now get almost into a whole month. And I think there's pros and cons to that. For us, that's more con than pro, to be perfectly frank. As a company, we believe we have a very unique assortment. Much of what we sell is product that has been designed in-house by our own design team, and you will therefore not find it anywhere else. So we don't need to play that best-price-in-town game with every other retailer selling our product. I also firmly believe, as do the rest of my partners, that if we are going to really sell that joy and really sell that emotion, then we need to make sure that we are talking up emotion more than we're talking up promotion.

So it has to always be emotion outweighing promotion, and that takes many different sides and many different ways. One of the ways is to make sure that even during a very heavy promotional period like Black Friday and Cyber Monday week, we can still deliver on emotion. We know people are coming in, we know new customers are coming to us at that time too. We want to make sure that we can deliver a great experience — online experience and store experience. Yes, there will be promotion involved as there always is, but we try to contain that to the best we can. We don't want to only deliver the promotion without still making good on our promise of delivering emotion during one of the most joyful times of the year.

Great question. Especially in beauty, especially in the more luxury beauty space, you really are selling — yes, there's features and benefits, yes there's efficacy, yes there's 'does it work' — but you're also selling emotion and you're selling a dream. And you need to make sure that the consistency of what your brand stands for is so heavily deliberate and you don't leave a lot to chance. Especially in an environment where your brand, because you cannot impact the experience the way you can in your own stores, you are reliant on the retailers — you're reliant on the Nordstroms, the Sephoras, the Macys, the Ultras of the world to actually deliver the experience for you. Your brand has to be so consistent, so true, and you need to understand what your brand promises. Whether you're Clinique and you're focused on entry-level, efficacious, great skincare, or you're coming to La Mer at a much different price point with a much different customer and much different needs — you can still deliver both. My almost ten years in beauty gave me a very solid marketing enhancement to my soft-goods space, because it is so much about the emotion and so much about what that brand stands for — both to me and what I want out of that brand and how I identify with that brand.

Well, I'm going to say something maybe a little controversial, which is: I think too many people don't spend enough time.

Especially younger people, I don't think a lot of people really spend enough time to truly make an impact. Your first year of any role, you're learning the ropes, learning the cycle of the business, learning your partners. The second year you're starting to comp yourself effectively, and then the third year you're starting to really make inroads and do new things, hopefully. It takes a while. I think people underestimate the value of creating those relationships, and then you actually have a much smoother and much more accelerated way of growth once you have those relationships built and those contacts made. Don't underestimate the value of time in an organization, because that makes your foundation that much stronger on which to actually deliver better results more quickly. The second thing I would say is, I don't think I've ever been anywhere less than five years or so. I've been here now five years and I still have a long runway to go — I think there's still a lot more opportunity here at Anthropologie. When I have made a change, it's always been based on not being unhappy with where I am now, but what am I excited about doing next. Too often I hear from people, 'I'm not really sure if I want to stay here any longer.' And I say: be careful that you're not running away versus running to. It's so easy to run away from something without being really clear about what you want to run to, and then you end up actually repeating that same cycle two years down the road, three years down the road, repeating the exact thing that made you run away the first time. For me, it's always been about every single job I've taken trying to make sure that I had a toolkit of real, credible experience that I knew I could bring to the table on day one, and then what excited me would be an opportunity that I could add to my toolkit through that role. If I think about my Saks to my J.Crew experience, I knew retail pretty well, I knew customer really well, I knew loyalty really well, but I didn't know digital. And that opportunity allowed me to add digital onto my direct marketing purview. Then when I went from J.Crew to Estée Lauder companies, I'd always been in soft goods and never worked for a beauty brand — and that's what excited me, in addition to it being a leader, in addition to it being a global organization, which J.Crew is not. I always weigh what can I bring and then what can I gain from this experience that is not able to be gained in my current role. If there's a way I can still gain it in my current role, that's my path of least resistance — I want to gain everything I can in my current role before I start seeking opportunities elsewhere.

Be curious every day. Think about things you can learn every single day and take every day seriously. I often say to people on my team: every opportunity, every meeting, every call, every email is an opportunity to grow and to shine. If you don't take that opportunity fully and if you don't take it seriously, then you're doing yourself a disservice. Take every single thing you do seriously, because that signals that you take your own career seriously. The second thing I would say is: form partnerships that may not be within your line of responsibility and line of seniority. Form partnerships with people in neighboring organizations or neighboring teams, because your partnerships and your relationships are going to be fundamental to your future. You may not necessarily realize it in the moment — they might come back many, many years later — but somehow, somewhere, all those relationships that you build and invest in are an investment in your own future and your own career. With every investment, they often compound over time, so make sure you're investing in those relationships as much as you're investing in the actual work at hand.

And I would say also: think of those relationships as not always with an intent to get. Think of them as an intent to give. If you go at it with the intent to give, then once you do need something, it will not feel like an ask, because people will be happy to help you. If you think about every day as an opportunity to give versus an opportunity to get, then I promise you, you will end up getting way more over time.

Well, I can give you two. One is: every day is a new day. Every day is a new way to do your best. It's up to you and how you're going to use it — no one's telling you, you can use it however you want, but use it to its fullest capacity. And the second one is actually a comment from my mom. I'm one of three children, and as all children, you're like, 'But no, so-and-so got something I didn't get, or why didn't I get this?' My mother said something very true to me — and I don't have children so I can't impart that knowledge down, but I can say — she said: 'If I'm going to treat you all fairly, I need to treat you all differently.' And I've never forgotten that. What that means is: I need to understand what is it that you — Matt, you, whomever — need to be successful, or to be your happiest, or to be your whatever, and that might be different from your sibling, and that's okay. If I'm going to do best for you, I need to make sure that I know what that best is, or at least infer what that best is, and I can give you something different than I'm going to give your sibling. I think of that with my own team. Get to know your senior leaders on your team. Get to know what makes them tick — not just tick on the career side, but what makes them tick on a personal side. When you can start to communicate with them in ways that make them feel special and unique, then I think you really have the magic happening in an organization.

Yep, absolutely.

Absolutely. Thanks, Matt. Pleasure meeting you, and thanks for your time.