Jeff Chu, writing for Fast Company:
Under Ahrendts, the two will be united for the first time. At Burberry, she pushed for a seamless consumer experience between online and brick-and-mortar. Everything about the messaging was unified, from the music played on the website and in stores to the photography and displays, all of which Bailey’s team curated and produced in-house. “The most vital thing is whatever they see on that landing page, they see in the windows,” she says. “If you walked into Men’s, in London, you should see those same looks on the mannequin at exactly the same time.”
In November, Apple introduced an Apple Store app for the iPad, a move that was widely seen as welcome but extraordinarily tardy. (There was already an Apple Store app for the iPhone, which was recently augmented with location-based technology.) The app quickly won praise for its design and user-friendliness, but it also highlighted incongruities with the website, which suggests that much work remains to be done to make all the different retail properties feel like parts of a whole rather than manifestations of the company’s fiefdoms.
This points to an even bigger challenge: How easily will Ahrendts merge the digital and retail staffs, who have never worked well together? The online team, long the less-favored child, will especially need a morale boost. “Online has such an inferiority complex. It has always had something to prove to retail,” says one former online team member. “But retail didn’t give a shit. Retail totally thinks they’re superior. There’s a real opportunity for Angela to bring a breath of fresh air and warmth to the culture.”
Fascinating piece. I’m very curious to see how the online/offline integration pans out.