In March 2021, Hudson’s Bay Company, which owns Saks Fifth Avenue, made an unusual move.
Hudson’s Bay split the luxury retailer’s ecommerce site and its physical stores into two separate companies.
The stores operate as one entity, called Saks Fifth Avenue, and the ecommerce business operates as another, called Saks.
The split doesn’t affect the customer experience – the two entities collaborate on marketing, customer data sharing and loyalty strategies – but does create a better runway for the ecommerce business to grow, says Saks CMO Emily Essner on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“It’s a novel structure,” she says, “but rooted in a belief that our brand is incredibly strong – one of our most valuable assets – and that we can do more to aggressively grow it.”
As a typical omnichannel retailer, with its ecommerce business and store footprint under the same banner, there’s often tension between those two divisions. Ecommerce is usually growing faster than the stores, but isn’t as big overall, so it doesn’t get the same level of investment or access to resources.
“It’s sort of the classic innovator’s dilemma,” Essner says. “The move was a recognition of the growth opportunity that was inherent within saks.com … and also that we have to change things to be able to focus appropriately on it.”
Also in this episode: Pandemic commerce trends, how Saks taps first-party customer data to fuel personalization, the rise of live shopping and how Essner’s senior thesis on fast-casual Mexican restaurants helped prepare her for her job as a marketing chief.
