The digital transformation aims to improve fulfillment capabilities for customers and allow them to choose how, when and where they want to shop. 

“This gives us the opportunity to provide endless aisle, click-and-collect, ship-from-store – that real connected commerce, omnichannel experience.” 

This digital transformation project follows the purchase of R.M. Williams by private investment group Tattarang, owned by Andrew (‘Twiggy’) and Nicola Forrest, in October 2020. 

“Tatterang’s vision for the brand isn’t like [that of a] private equity, with a shorter runway of five to seven years. Tatterang has a much longer term vision for the brand. And that support has given us the foundation to take these steps to make this investment,” Alexander said. 

Modernising made-to-order

Alongside the e-commerce site upgrade, the heritage footwear and clothing brand is building out its marketing automation capability and core customer data platform.

“The first phase is overall modernising our total customer environment from a technology standpoint, so making sure we’ve got the right tools in place to talk to a customer, more personalisation in how we speak to them and marketing cloud to enable us to speak to specific audiences,” Alexander said. 

The brand is also working with New Store to modernise its made-to-order experience for customers, which is a major part of its e-commerce strategy. R.M.Williams’ team members will use their iPhone to guide customers through the process of designing their own pair of boots.

“We are working on a 3D product configurator that will go online and will also be available in store. There will be 300,000 different combinations that they’ll be able to pick from, and they’ll be able to see a digital representation of the boot that they create online. That boot will then be made for them and shipped to them.”

This technology is expected to be rolled out in February or March 2022. 

A new order management system will replace the existing point of sale (POS) platform at RM Williams with a new order management system (OMS), which will streamline the associate-customer interaction, allow access to all inventory and provide a consistent experience across every retail channel as the company scales globally.

Coupled with the mobile point-of-sale (mPOS), the retailer will be able offer mobile checkout and other omni features, such as endless aisle, buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS), buy-online-return-in-store (BORIS) and ship-from-store.

“The new OMS will maximise the productivity of the inventory that we have in our stores to ultimately service the customer better, no matter what channel they want to interact with us, whether it’s our own online channel, whether it’s a marketplace channel, or whether it’s through our retail stores,” Alexander said. 

“It’s about really tying all of those channels together seamlessly.” 

International growth

R.M. Williams currently has 68 stores in Australia and seven internationally. Alexander said 75-80 per cent of R.M. Williams’ total business is in Australia, and that the future strategy is about driving that international business. 

“It’s not just about opening physical retail locations for us internationally, that’s still part of the strategy, but in these Covid times, it’s going to be more about how we partner, and the marketplaces that we choose to partner with internationally,” he said. 

“We see huge opportunities when it comes to marketplaces in the future, especially in those international markets. They have huge site traffic, huge customer networks already, so partnering with the likes of Zalando, Net-A-Porter, gives us an opportunity to use that scale to help grow the brand internationally.”