The merchandising view: James Brooke of 10CMS

In our series of interviews (part 1, part 2) with people at the forefront of online merchandising, we now turn to James Brooke, the CEO and co-founder of visual merchandising expert company 10CMS.

What is the story behind 10CMS?

10CMS was founded in January 2008. There are four of us co-founders, and we had spent the previous ten years building online channels for some of the largest global brands. The core innovation behind 10CMS, the ability to create very rich media without programming, came from our frustration at the time and cost of building and managing rich online experiences. Our initial customers were large global brands like Shell and GE, as well as well known UK lifestyle brands like Heals and multi-channel retailers like Tesco.

In December last year, we completed A-round financing of 2.4 million euros. We are putting that money to good use in many ways. First of all, we have invested a large amount of resources in re-engineering our platform based on the feedback from our enterprise retail clients. While our product started more like a software development kit (SDK) for building rich merchandising templates, we have now turned it into a complete on-demand, SaaS based merchandising solution.

Merchandisers can now execute their campaigns without having to rely on IT assistance. We have also added support for workflows – supporting organizations where one department may be responsible for creating the base templates, and other teams or people do the design work and re-merchandise the display. Another area we are looking at is international expansion, both to the US and further into Europe.

What are some of the key trends in visual merchandising today?

The online retail market is becoming more and more competitive – it is just so easy to jump from one store to the next, and consumers have a really short attention span. You can tell by the conversion rates, which are very low in general online.

That means retailers must now work even harder to build an engaging and compelling user experience – something to make visitors “stick” and persuade them to buy. To accomplish that, brands are becoming more editorial and more content-driven. Instead of presenting products in the old-fashioned “grid”, online stores are looking more and more like magazines with attractive and inspirational product presentations.

Speed is also becoming more important – to be able to catch customers’ interest, you need to be able to quickly create new campaigns around current themes. We’re moving from cycle times of 2 weeks to something closer to 2 hours.

Finally, visual merchandising is becoming more business-driven. It is not just about creating stunning designs – the primary purpose is after all to generate more sales. For example, the ability to let customers add an item to basket immediately, without having to click through to another page, is becoming standard.

If merchandising is becoming so fast-paced, how can merchandisers keep up?

More user-friendly technology is obviously an important enabler – the ability for merchandisers to create, publish and update campaigns anywhere, any time is a great help.

One upcoming feature we are really excited about is the ability to connect 10CMS’ presentation layer to product feeds. Instead of manually selecting which products to merchandise, retailers will be able to use behavioral merchandising technology like Avail’s to personalize the product selection to each visitor – and still present the products in a rich and engaging way. That will make a major difference in merchandiser productivity.

The emergence of the “Social Internet” has really impacted the entire world. How is it affecting visual merchandising?

I hear a lot about it, and not just from customers. Our Head of User Experience, Mo Syed, is a PhD in the psychology of online social interaction and is very passionate about this field.

The most obvious aspect is that the visual merchandising is becoming more social and interactive. For example, the Conran Shop has used 10CMS to create a way to you turn your wishlist into a scrapbook that you can then share with others – some may use it as a form of self-expression, if you’re into design, others just to show the spouse what they’re thinking of buying for the house.

New retail channels – like Facebook – also require that you need to be able to publish your merchandising there too. We see a lot of customer activity within “Facebook commerce” right now. One key aspect when you are merchandising outside your site, that Mo speaks about, is how important it is to facilitate the buying and require as few clicks as possible. Going from inspiration to execution needs to be quick – “lose the moment and lose the sale”.

Another big topic of discussion right now – HTML5 or Flash. How should retailers think about this?

Clearly, browsers are becoming much more powerful. There are still some things, like 3D animation, which requires Flash, but the gap is closing. Eventually, at some point in time, Flash will probably become redundant.

But right now, you can’t rely on customers to know some devices don’t support Flash – most people can’t be bothered to know what their computer or phone supports, and why should they? In the end, it’s the retailer’s problem.

The way retailers should approach this is to have multiple levels of support – starting with standards-compliant HTML5 and CSS. If the browser doesn’t support that, it should fall back to Flash, and if there’s no Flash support either, to standard HTML (HTML4). That way you give customers the best possible experience, and ensure your rich merchandising is always SEO-friendly.

What are some examples of retailers you think have put visual merchandising to smart use?

Fashion retailer Awear and design outlet TK Maxx are two of my favorite examples.

They are both in the “fast fashion” space, and need to create new merchandising content fast. For example, TK Maxx may very well get a shipment of 50 dresses and 1000 pairs of sunglasses that they need to move fast – it’s all about creating an inspirational display, and then updating it quickly as items sell out or new items appear. Awear designs a new editorial display every day – sometimes 2 or 3 a day – to introduce new products. Merchandising technology is an important enabler for their business model, in both cases.

But visual merchandising is not only about fashion. Halfords, the sports retailer, doubled their click-through rate by adding a carousel of current offers on their home page. On category pages, click-through rates increased fourfold. With a lot of traffic, such an improvement quickly adds up to ‘real money’.

How do you measure if your merchandising is successful or not?

Well, that has been a big dilemma in visual merchandising for a long time. Frankly, web analytics platforms like IBM Coremetrics or Adobe’s Omniture are not very good at measuring merchandising performance at the granular level that is required for it to be actionable. You can’t work on a page level – after all, you may have 2, 3, or even more widgets on the same page.

A merchandising display is always a hypothesis and a goal – e.g. “by displaying this hero product A, that will drive sales of secondary products B and C”. You need to be able to measure how it performs specifically towards that goal, and also how users are interacting with each part of the display, such as which hotspots they click or don’t click.

Metrics is an area that we at 10CMS have put a lot of emphasis on – we just added an analytics framework and will continue to develop it. Ultimately we want to enable our customers to create and deploy more compelling merchandising media more often, into ay channel and use the analytics to learn what really drives customer response, and then optimize that experience on a daily basis to deliver a more compelling and profitable user experience.

To learn more about 10CMS, visit their website at http://www.10cms.com. For example, there’s a great case study on Awear (no registration required).