Examining Mr Price Group’s search to modernize
During the pandemic, Sim and her team launched an e-commerce platform for one of their retail brands, a women’s clothing store called Miladys.
During the pandemic, Sim and her team launched an e-commerce platform for one of their retail brands, a women’s clothing store called Miladys. The brand didn’t have any e-commerce presence before, which meant they couldn’t operate when the world went into lockdown.
“We know that the Miladys customer is more conservative, so even when restrictions eased, they were hesitant to head back into the store,” she says. So the problem they were trying to solve was finding a way to boost sales in a way that made their customers feel safe and comfortable.
Acknowledging they had to bring something to market quite quickly, the online offering had to remain “vanilla.”
“The solution we have running for the rest of the business is far more complicated but for this project, we just wanted to give them a ticket to the game,” she says. This isn’t to say the execution process was simple, however. According to Sim, building an ecommerce offering from scratch meant doing things like capturing imagery and writing product descriptions for every product, choosing a suitable approach to order fulfilment, and training in-store staff to do things they’d never done before.
“It was such a nice project in that we landed something in a very short space of time,” she says. “We were incredibly agile, made decisions quickly, had support from the top, and everybody bought into what we were trying to achieve. It was incredibly successful. Even with the cost to set this up, they were profitable in a very short space of time.” And the brand managed to maintain their customer service standards even though they were changing their ways of working.
“Even today, if you visit the Miladys website and add items to your basket but don’t check out, you’ll get a phone call asking if you need any assistance with the checkout process,” Sim adds.
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