So, David, good morning. Absolute pleasure to be with you. Thank you for taking the time out of your super busy schedule to talk about digital transformation and all the amazing changes you've been making all the way back to 2019 for the Pandora business. So I think starting at the beginning is a good place to start. And thinking back to your arrival at Pandora, which was 2019, you were setting direction for the team, setting direction for the company and establishing those foundations for the digital transformation to come. Can you share with us where you started from? So the starting position and how you went about making the change?
Early 2019, I was brought into the business to, quote, sort out e-commerce. It's very regionalized. So we had three global regions who all saw their job as well. Lovely to have you, but we're here to run e-commerce. A small development team in Baltimore. And e-commerce was really only, by that point, three or four years old in Pandora because Pandora had made so much growth and so much money from store expansion, global franchise expansion. So e-commerce was seen as a bit of an IT project. So we had a pretty low base to start with and a lot to do in a very short space of time. Now, 2019 to 2020, thank goodness we did get a lot of stuff done. So we rebuilt the websites, started the code consolidation, and we've been on a journey with Sapient ever since on that journey. We rebuilt, thank goodness we rebuilt the back-end operations and customer service piece, and we deployed Service Cloud, I think also with Sapient, back in the day in early 2020, just before the pandemic hit. So we had no lights on through peak 2019. We had all kinds of customer issues. I was answering customer queries on Facebook UK on Christmas Day because we had no back-end. We had a selling engine, but we had no service engine, no ability to deliver on our promise. And we partnered super strongly with our supply chain team and built out a very rapidly built out a good operating model. And then COVID hit. So we'd given ourselves a chance of success at that point. That was where we were.
Brilliant. That's fantastic to hear and kind of interesting timing and fortuitous timing that you've been able to create the foundations before the pandemic hit. Now, during the pandemic, and we're all familiar now with the implications of the pandemic, you were able to accelerate this quest to sort of really enhance the digital capabilities and the customer experience. And some of those improvements included virtual queuing, click and collect, virtual assistants, I think endless aisles. I mean, there's a substantial set of features that you implemented in a really short space of time. The thing that I'm super interested to learn is, you know, how did those experiences perform sort of post pandemic once stores had reopened and consumers started to get back to maybe more normal shopping patterns?
It's really, really good question. And I'll give two answers. So the first piece about how we accelerated through that phase through 2020, we're building out the digital capability, the digital team. We were actually having people relocate through the pandemic into Copenhagen, hiring in Copenhagen. We opened the digital hub, which is five minutes down the waterfront from our main office here in Copenhagen. But then critically, if you take someone like our fantastic general manager in Italy, Massimo, the e-commerce at that point was three people in the corner of his office. He didn't quite understand what they did, but he was a brilliant stores guy. He suddenly found himself boss of a pure play business. So the cultural change in the business was fantastic. That was the pivot. That's what helped us commercially accelerate through that time. But then also the guys were turning up with like, I must have curbside collection. I must have this. And we were getting peppered with good ideas. So we took a grip on that. So we're going to create a rapid, agile development process. And that also helps educate people in the business about what is agile by doing it, not just doing presentations about let's tell you why agile is good. So we're able to take a different approach to building things and rapidly develop stuff in parallel. And we deployed so many different propositions, like you're saying, very rapidly into different markets through the middle of 2020.
That's fascinating. And just to double click on that, how good do you think you were at predicting with the business leaders, with Massimo and the other teams, which features or which capabilities would land?
Oh, we're pretty terrible. I think that's the point. Because the GMs were saying, I must have this thing. And it's all coming from a good place. But as I say a lot in life, must is a strong word. And so I think getting to that rapid test and learn process, that's been the accelerator. That's been the multiplier longer term. So now all functionality. We have eight clusters around the world, eight selling clusters around the world grouped together, the countries. And my digital team work with those clusters every week, every month on the test and learn schedule, what things we're going to put into the hopper, making sure the test is statistically valid so that we can then feed those into the main platform. And now we do have one main platform because we spent the past 18 months modernizing the Salesforce platform, getting to the latest SFRA version. So now we can really push global function and feature. But it's all driven by test rather than that old phrase, the hippo, the highest paid person's opinion, you know, just avoiding that.
I'm familiar with that. Yeah. I get told it a lot by my team. It's like, yeah. But, you know, I think that's the accelerator for us.
That's very cool. And what I also take away from that is the pace you've been working at and using those approaches have also helped bring the whole business on a cultural change to kind of understand what agile can mean, the value it can bring and really sort of change the business as well as the sort of outward looking customer.
Oh, absolutely. And being customer centered at the heart of that. So at the end of 2020, my boss, Alexander, said, you guys do things a bit differently. Yeah. And so he made the decision to combine together what was at that point IT with my digital function with data and analytics and BI. So we brought this all together in January 21. We're now digital and technology as a new function. And so I personally went on a very steep learning curve. I didn't even know what an ERP was three years ago, you know, because I'm a digital guy. But we've applied the same mentality to that broader canvas now of all of the technology in the business, whether it's your planning systems or logistics or whatever it is. So that's the real scale up for us now. That's really the exciting piece that we're in the middle of.
Very, very interesting. So thinking back to Pandora's customers and the customer shopping habits, how have they, so we've talked a little bit about the pandemic, but how have those customer shopping habits changed post pandemic? Now the stores are open and we're kind of well into a year or so of kind of post pandemic shopping. What are you seeing in terms of the behavior?
So over 80 percent of all of our transactional journeys start online, but 80 percent of them are completed in a store. So we have to have this working well. And, you know, we're all shoppers. You know, I love shopping, you know, but we don't think about what channel am I going to choose? You just engage with the brand, hopefully. So usually it's about how you align internally, how you align KPIs and how you get that working. But customers move fluidly between our channels. And our product is a, it can be a complex sale because you're selling, you know, for a gift, you're selling the bracelet, you're talking about charms, you're explaining how the clips work and so on. So it's not just retail operations in a store, it's a selling journey. You know, what's important to you, what's important to the person you're buying for?
Thinking about sort of the conversation we've had so far, it definitely seems to me that you've made a lot of the right choices. So I think what has been maybe fortuitous is that you were already on a journey. You were able to set up foundations and then accelerate through the pandemic, creating that brilliant digital experience, and then have been able to fuse online and offline post the pandemic to kind of drive volume in those more mature markets, all of which is such a fabulous story and has shown fiscal results as well. So obviously there's lots of things in there that are, I think, super valuable. So could you reflect on that and just share with us, you know, what your decision process looks like? So how do you think about placing your bets sort of generally around how you set things up, but also how you make choices?
Sure. OK, big question. I think the first part to it for me is then our organization, the way our P&L is set up, I've worked in organizations, I'm sure you have, where cost control is super important because you can be a hero by cutting a million euros out of the P&L in terms of cost. That's true here. We have a very cost-centered culture, but our P&L, we're biased towards driving the top line because the faster we drive the top line, just the more positive everything is. And so our choices in digital and technology are very simple, that first filter. It's about top line driving initiatives first, and then it's about improving the machine underneath the covers second. And so what's that that's meant over the last two and a half years of the bigger digital transformation is we started doubling down on MarTech. I mentioned the modernization of the e-com stack, which we made great progress on, butIversuper exciting because it is about having this machine where we have you know we have the systems of record and the data that we need to kind of anchor the business but also increasingly we've got data that we can use to understand the consumer but also understand employees colleagues pandorians I think we call them and to be able to really deliver that next generation consumer experience and colleague experience sort of unleashing data and AI so I think that's super exciting but for me in everything you talk about there's this anchor of building culture sustainable culture and capability and doing that in a really authentic way to the brand but there's also a piece for me and that's super important but there's also a piece about being anchored in value you know growth finding growth finding value and being really precise with what you focus on and you've also said and it's come out in a few of our sort of conversation themes you know being prepared to fail and stopping things because I think you've done that across the journey as well haven't you?
Yeah we have yeah I mean goodness me we could talk for another two hours about things we've screwed up or whatever you know but it's important it's important to carry that lightly but it's also important to recognize when like you said when something's not behaving the way you thought it would just shutting it down moving on it's not the end of the world you know let's try something else let's get the let's get the folks working in that space to work on something else and I think you know equally you know being committed to something because it is part of a longer term strategic play that no we're going to keep we're going to keep failing forwards I think that's really important part of this as well
brilliant so we've got the machine we've got the data we're anchoring in value okay staying obsessed around experience for our pandorians and our customers and we're failing fast where we need to so we can learn thank you David for the time today it's been an absolute delight love the conversation appreciate the time and look forward to staying in touch
fantastic thank you very much cheers