Desigual's Aleksandra Olszewska on Reinventing a Brand, Bridging Digital and Store & What's Next With AI | Live from Paris

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton, and we're coming to you from the Vuzion podcast studio in booth 043 at NRF's Big Show Europe in Paris.

And joining me now is Alexander Olsecka, the global commercial and digital director at Desegual.

Hopefully I said that correctly or as close as I can probably get it right.

It was perfect.

It was perfect.

How are you doing this morning?

Thanks for being with us.

Thank you for inviting me.

I'm fine, thank you.

Yeah, we're having a great time before we even got started with this interview, but tell us about yourself and your career and also your role at Desegual.

Well, a fun fact.

I studied literature.

Did you?

Spanish and English, Yes.

Oh, now we're talking.

Okay.

All right.

Somehow ended up working just after I graduated at one of the most successful startups in Spain.

So started doing operations and procurement and then eventually the E commerce site.

It was an e commerce startup selling off price fashion and then successfully sold to a big group here in France, Van Prievin.

So I did many different things there.

Yeah.

Because we started as 60 people in a startup and ended up being a very big company.

Ended up doing E commerce Marketplace.

Project.

Project.

Part of it.

So technical.

Part of it.

And then the commercial one as well.

And then in 2020, just in the middle of COVID I joined the Sigma.

Okay.

As a digital and CRM director.

And after a few years serving COVID Wave digitally and.

Yeah.

Using this big opportunity to actually grow the company digitally and make the company understand digital.

Right, Right.

I was appointed as a commercial director to the company.

So now overviewing all the different commercial channels.

Wow.

I want to get into that, but since you.

Since you gave me the opportunity, and this is why I love doing this job, is when I could ask questions that are just totally out of left field too, to some degree.

So English literature to digital leadership, that's quite the transition, you know?

What.

How.

How did that happen?

Like, was it just circumstance?

Happenstance?

Like what?

Talk about that.

I mean, I don't know if you knew who you wanted to be when you went to college.

Nope, still don't.

But I liked reading and I said, okay, let's go and do that.

And then I wasn't.

I didn't suck at math, but.

Well, I don't know.

I didn't see myself doing economy.

I don't know.

Yeah, right.

But then, yeah, reading was only reading, you know, like literature theory.

Theory wasn't really my thing.

Yeah.

But management was okay.

And I wasn't bad at numbers.

So.

Yeah, at some point I had to do a business school on the way.

Yeah, Prevaila told me.

Okay.

Oscesca, right, Francesca.

They called you by your last name.

That's great.

Let's make you counting.

So you're kind of the qualitative and the quantitative person, I take it.

Like you kind of go on both sides of the brain then.

I like the idea.

You like the idea.

Yes.

Right.

All right, so you talked about, you talked about the expanded role, right, that you're now overseeing the commercial aspects of the business.

What does that enabled you to do now that you weren't able to do before?

Well, I was overseeing CRM from the almost very beginning.

And so I could influence all the different channels, but still there were many different tensions.

You know, every channel was trying to get the most out of itself and the most of the company for itself.

And now we resolved many of those tensions.

You know, we look at the customer and where the customer actually moves what he needs in every different channel and well, there is less conflict, more collaboration.

It's all easier and it's using companies resources wiser, I guess, you know, stock, capex investment.

So it's.

Yeah.

Seeing the whole thing with the economics, the customer and, and the product side as one.

Yeah, well, and I feel like that's, I feel like that's a general like move in this side of the industry.

Over here in Europe too, is taking that type of approach to see it all holistically.

Do you agree with that?

Is that, is that the right way to go about it or are there puts and takes with it?

I think this is the right way to go about it and I think it's easier to do it from digital to commercial.

Yeah.

Okay.

Why then the other way around?

Yes, I agree.

Digital is a very specific animal and a complex one.

There is many more KPIs to it.

There is technology, there is some complexity around it, and once you've mastered that, it's easier to move into store and then understand the parallels of the two words and the differences as well.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that, having done both myself.

Like I always thought, I always thought there was a completely different language for both.

The language you're using to talk about your digital performance is very different than the language you're talking about to analyze your store performance to a lot of degree.

No, no, not at all.

No.

I mean, the Sigua has been in the market for the last 40 years and it was an enormous company with many very brilliant Minds involved.

So, yeah, our physical retail language is pretty evolved.

Is it?

Yeah.

Oh, wow, that's great.

God, that's amazing because, like, for me, when I went into the.

Cause I went the other way.

I went from stores to digital.

And when I went into digital, I was like, I have no idea what anybody's talking about.

So maybe, maybe because your perspective comes digital first, like you said.

And that's probably partly why you think that too, right?

Say more about why you think it's better to have that digital experience under your belt.

I mean, I've seen people going the other way around, and it's much more complicated because.

Yeah, you.

I mean, it took me many years to understand the technology behind.

I participated firsthand in many different projects.

So I understand some complexities.

Yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of language in digital you don't get to understand in retail because.

And there is development, there is scrum, there is user stories, whatever.

Right.

But there's also conversion and traffic.

Yep, yep.

Yeah, that's a good point, though.

Like, I never thought about that until you just said it too.

The other interesting thing of what you're talking about is like, if you're in the digital side of retailing, you have to understand the technology applications that are driving that side of the business too.

Where on the store side, maybe not as much like, you don't actually have to think about that as.

At least in the old world, but maybe, maybe now that's changing to some degree.

So that's an interesting point to think about too.

Is it the way retail is evolving?

We have to think about it.

You have to have a digital acumen, both in terms of the digital business, but also the technology platforms underneath it.

All right, let's shift gears a little bit too.

So desegual is in the middle of a reinvention.

So talk to us about that.

What does that mean?

How's it going?

What are the early signs of progress?

It has meant a lot of suffering during the last five years, I'd say.

Yeah, because we've been reinventing ourselves for the last five years.

So we've lost a lot of revenue, a lot of customers on the way.

We had to make important decisions around product distribution, closed stores, stop producing some of the best sellers.

Because the Rainvention is all about becoming younger, really, and becoming, in terms of customer and also becoming a different brand, I'd say positioned as a.

In a fashion world a little bit more than it used to be.

We used to say about ourselves that we were not a fashion brand.

We are a fashion brand now.

We converse with trends, don't follow them necessarily or set them up.

But we do have this conversation and we need to have it in today's world.

We've done everything we could.

I guess we changed our product, we changed our distribution and I guess, and maybe because I first hand was involved in that, our communication.

We used to be a traditional fashion company that communicated to their customers through traditional media.

And we shifted all this investment to social media, so digital media.

And we had to learn on the way not only how to invest into traditional content in social media, but how to create a very different content and very different campaigns for social media.

So we've been mastering that during the last few years.

We first had to undergo diet phase.

I'd say, okay, yeah, because we're fun and bold.

Okay.

And we had to become a little bit less bold during a few years in order to get upgraded in the fashion industry because we were weird, crazy, you know, very far from fashion conversations.

Interesting.

We positioned ourselves there first and now we're coming back to being really bold.

So really using our values or putting them in practice, let's say.

So I gotta ask you because I imagine there's a lot of companies that are going through something, a similar type of exploration, at least internally, maybe they're talking about it or not.

But as you went through this and you look back on it, what do you think worked well in trying to make that transition and what do you think didn't work as well?

I mean, for the last 12 months, and believe me, it's been very long, five years, I'm waking up every morning and looking our sales grow at high double digits, both in digital.

But digital was a different story.

We started investing heavily in digital.

Digital was always growing and growing importantly, but now even more importantly with less investment, which is a very good thing.

And then our stores coming, getting a lot of traffic.

So it all ended up working well.

And when I look back, I mean there were a lot of learnings on the way.

Product itself was a very important piece of that.

And so we went too young in some of the collections, then went back and went back, maybe too old again.

But now with the success we have, with the traffic's coming back, with very young customers showing up at our stores and our digital, I guess we feel rainforest and it's all just like a very positive circle fueling itself forward.

We are, you know, the better we do, the more, the better we do, the better we do.

Yeah, right, right, right.

Yeah.

I mean, we're Convinced about that.

This is the way.

And this is.

Yeah, this is the way.

Yeah.

I mean, the lesson there is, like, in retail, product, product still rules.

You got to have the product right.

I mean, that's my big takeaway from what you said.

Yeah.

And fashion particularly.

Yeah.

And retail in general.

You got to get the product right.

All right, so let's get you out of here on this.

So we're.

We're in Paris.

We're at NRF's show in Paris.

What's.

What's.

What's the what?

What's one thing you hope to take back from this conference, you know, and what brought you here?

Well, I haven't come here to find or look for something specifically.

You know, I like to take some time out of the office or out of the normal meeting room, I guess, spending a lot of time in meeting rooms.

So get myself outside of the office, talk to people in retail sphere, meet companies, startups.

So it's not about searching or finding something specific.

It's about just stopping and getting a little bit of perspective.

Right.

Talking to as many people as we can here with my team.

Yeah.

And then you get some ideas, you know, some stuff that you don't do, and it's not necessarily the solution, but out of the conversation, you get an interesting point that you can use.

I love that.

So it's about taking a break from the everyday grind and just coming and getting space for your brain to come and.

And absorb new things, have new conversations with your colleagues or within your network.

And so that's really great.

Awesome.

So what do you hope to accomplish this year?

What's next on the horizon?

I hope to keep on growing, and we're actually in conversations now, finding the right balance between growth and profitability, specifically in digital investment.

This is something that we are now trying to figure out also, I guess, like everybody else, trying to put AI in work and make the best out of it.

You know, there's an amazing technology, but we still need to learn how to use it, how to use it in content, how to use it in analysis.

I mean, just so now putting it importantly to work, and me personally, I am enjoying the ride.

And yeah, the more I do, the more I work, the more experience I get.

I learned that, you know, it's not about a single area, but the most important problems or interesting problems sit between the areas actually in connecting the dots.

So this is my next challenge.

There are some important tensions that need to be there, but there are some that can be resolved and it will just let us move forward quicker.

Yeah, it's the art of management, at the end of the day, like finding those connection points and making a difference.

Well, that was awesome.

We'll have to have you back to talk about your discoveries on AI next year because I'm curious to see what you find, because I think that what you just brought up is very, very top of mind for almost every retailer here in terms of trying to figure out what, where to apply it and get the most from it.

So, Alexander, thank you so much for your time today.

It was great meeting you.

It was great connecting with you on LinkedIn before the show as well.

Thanks to Vusion and to NRF Paris for allowing us to come in and bring you great interviews with folks like Alexander here.

And as always, be careful out there.