Moving a classic fashion brand into a digital-first world has its challenges, so famed watchmaker Movado Group has kept a tight focus on its core while undergoing a digital transformation.
Movado Group President of Commercial, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Technology Officer Behzad Soltani told PYMNTS how the brand has navigated from the pandemic’s shift to digital, to the great retail reopening, to inflation-fueled belt-tightening, by fine-tuning and diversifying its sales channels, tech and territories.
“Technology’s such an important part of digital transformation, so we focused on making sure we have a robust technology stack,” he said, noting how the brand’s efforts to streamline the customer experience have paid off. “We’ve consolidated. We had multiple eCommerce platforms, and our various brands were using different providers.”
He applied his technical background to harmonizing the eCommerce side of the business in 2020 and 2021, bringing in omnichannel payments platform Adyen to get a more unified view of the brand’s activities from 55 freestanding Movado stores, as well as its retail relationships with Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and now Amazon and Walmart, to name a few.
“We tried to standardize to help us become a lot more efficient and be able to move fast,” Soltani said. “It has paid off. During COVID digital was so important, and we saw a massive surge. For example, Movado.com sales are 10 times the size where they were four years ago. We have been able to really move the needle for the company when it comes to digital.”
Part of that lift came from adding acceptance of payment types online and in-store including Apple Pay and G-Pay in digital wallets, as well as partnering with a pair of buy now, pay later (BNPL) giants to increase sales of Movado’s 10 owned and licensed brands.
These include the Movado brand and its popular MVMT collection, as well as watches it makes under license for Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, Lacoste and Ebel, among others.
Often described as an “accessible luxury” brand, Movado is benefitting from bringing in both Affirm and Klarna to put its fashionable line in the hands of more shoppers via installments.
“We partner both with Affirm and Klarna. Klarna is for our Olivia Burton brand in the U.K. That’s deployed there,” he said.
“Our MVMT brand in the U.S. also uses Klarna. Movado, because it has a higher price point, we use Affirm on that site. About 50% of our transactions are traditional credit cards, and then another 50% are all these alternative payment methods. It is a pretty significant part of our payments at this point.”
International sales have also been expanded since Soltani arrived at Movado five years ago, to the point where Soltani said half of its overall sales volume is now from outside of the U.S.
On that front, he said, “We do think that [payments] localization is important to consumers” in different parts of the world.
“People in the U.K. want to pay a little bit differently than the way they do it in U.S. and so on. We have a partnership with EshopWorld. They support our cross-border efforts, and it takes that kind of localization even further. We ship to over 100 countries and some of those countries have very unique [local] payments” that Movado now accepts.
One area the watchmaker is staying clear of for now is the digital wearables that Apple, Google, and others are doubling down on. The Big Tech offerings tend to be integrated with health monitoring functionality synced to smartphone apps, and that’s not Movado’s sweet spot.
That’s largely because “Consumers use them differently,” he said. “It’s more like health and wellness versus something you put on when you’re about to go to a nice dinner. Those are two different spaces. Even though Connect 2.0 did well for us, we are mostly focused on traditional watches. To really succeed in that space, you need to own the entire ecosystem.”
As for his outlook on the certain uncertainty of this year, Soltani told PYMNTS, “Quite frankly, there’s a lot of smarter people than me trying to figure out what 2023 is going to look like. Some days you’re hearing it’s going to be a terrible recession, and the next day it’s a soft landing,” he said.
“What I do know is that we have learned if you make great products, the consumers will find a way to buy them. That’s the thing we can control, and that’s what we’re focusing on.”
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