Kimberley Walker 00:00
Yeah, but I will say a lot of it is really making sure that we're continuing to step out of the market. Go into stores, go to trade shows, chat to chat to people. You know, ultimately you need to, you need to keep connecting with the customer and and talk to them.
Andrew Maff 01:15
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing Kimberley Walker, who is the Director of Brand partnerships over at Sportique. Kimberley, how you doing? Ready for a good show?
Kimberley Walker 01:29
I am happy to be here.
Andrew Maff 01:32
Yeah. I appreciate you being on the show. Very excited to learn a lot about yourself and, of course, about the business I always like to do, kind of the stereotypical thing. Give you the floor. And have you tell us a little bit about your background, where you got started, how you got involved with sportique, and we'll take it from there.
Kimberley Walker 01:48
Amazing. Well, it is a pleasure to be here. Andrew. A little bit more about me. I started my journey. I'm originally from Australia, so I started in retail, and started in actually, in E commerce, right from the get go. I knew I went to fashion school, I started working on that side of the industry, and then realized pretty quickly that I was better suited to the business side, and that's how I stepped into buying, which was the avenue that I started in, and stepped into an E commerce business within Australia that became the largest online shoe retailer in the country. It was emulating Zappos actually at the time Tony Shea's business, so started in the buying side of things. Really loved the blend of creative and commercial thinking, and came up through that, then went into a very large global retail business in the Watch space. And that was bricks and mortar, doing purchasing there as well, and brand management. And then that took me over to Hong Kong briefly as well to work in the APAC market. And then along that journey as well, then land in the US doing again, more brand management and purchasing, but in the largest global market, and, you know, popped around a few other places, but ultimately, I knew I wanted to be back in E commerce. I'd done bricks and mortar, I, you know, done in store, and realized that that space was really where I felt passionate about many, many years later, I now work for Sportique. I am based in San Francisco, and just being in the hub of tech and E commerce, I knew about the business for some time, living in the city and connected with the founder and really loved what they were doing. Really loved the thoughtful curation and the way that they structured their business.
Andrew Maff 04:10
Nice. So for those listening that may not be familiar with Sportique, can you tell us a little bit about the business? Because it's an eclectic list of products. It's a, it's a very much like a lifestyle focus. Like, can you tell us a little bit about that and kind of its offering?
Kimberley Walker 04:26
Of course. So Sportique was founded about 15 years ago, and the founder was really inspired by Colette in Paris. That was like the spark moment for him, where he saw these beautiful, highly curated brands in a beautiful space in Paris, and was like, Why is this not represented in the US? Why can't these brands exist here? And you know, it's really elevated, premium, contemporary brands. And really wanted that to give them a space in the States and to really let them shine. So that's how the site was birthed, and how we still go about our curation process as well. But really, from the beginning, it was about, I would say the assortment was about 50% international brands and 50% local coming US brands. And still to this day, it's, it's a really beautiful international mix of products, and our categories range from home to fashion accessories, lifestyle, and then, more recently, we've been stepping into a lot more of beauty and wellness as well. It's what we've been hearing from our customers. But to your point, very eclectic mix we can, you know, we have everything from, you know, tech accessories that are simple, like simplistic phones, like mobiles, which is, you know, pulling back on distractions from your phone. This is really highly thoughtful, beautiful phones to home storage to protein powders as well. But again, it's every brand that we partner with. It is a really thoughtful and long term partnership.
Andrew Maff 06:33
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Kimberley Walker 07:20
Sure, when we do our curation process, it is a combination of a lot of research, also looking at customer feedback and customer surveys, seeing what customers are requesting, or, you know what's, what's out there in the market. Things like, when we look at our we look at the product positioning. So from a category perspective, where we see a lot of gaps or opportunity, you know, premium price points. So customers, like our target customer, comes to our site. You know, they are looking for elevated one off products. We, you know, our price point can be anywhere from like, $100 all the way up to, you know, a couple of thousand dollars for a product so really something niche and unique that the customer is really taking their time to find, I would say that in terms of their current positioning in the market, like where they are, what stores they're in, or where they're in, outside of potentially being ranged with Sportique, really boutique positioning and and, or some luxury retailers as well bricks and mortar retailers, we really look into those types of partners that there exists, You know, have existing relationships with where we're not looking for brands that are necessarily in big, big box retailers, for example, we really want it to be an exclusivity and an elevated aspect.
Andrew Maff 09:13
Is it more product led or brand led? So to clarify on that. So do you kind of find that hole in the market, like you said, you find that opportunity for a specific type of product, and then you go and find the brand that you think would be a good fit to be offered. Or do you actually come across the brands and then decipher, is this a good product fit or not?
Kimberley Walker 09:38
Sure can be a bit of both. We do a lot of research. We also go to a lot of trade shows, which helps us keep up as to what brands are out there and what products we should be stepping into, or categories, I would say, a lot of the time it is brand led, however, it's if we see gaps in particular products, and we're getting a lot of data coming through, through our channels that are saying, you know, this particular product type, we will then do it as product led but I will say a lot of it is really make sure that we're continuing to step out of the market. Go into stores, go to trade shows, chat to chat to people. You know, ultimately you need to, you need to keep connecting with the customer and and talk to them.
Andrew Maff 10:39
The model of it, you know, basically building out this marketplace more or less of these types of products. Like, I love the concept. It makes a ton of sense. I can see how incredibly lucrative it could be, and how to really dig into, like, building that community that's interested in the type of products. But I also know from a like, how complicated it can get, because you're really leveraging the existing brand awareness of these other brands. So how do you, how do you kind of keep from, how do you keep your brand, the Sportique brand, from getting hurt if these other brands you know are doing something that might not align with your values? I like managing those partnerships, I can imagine, is a little bit of a challenge just to make sure that their messaging and everything remains aligned with the Sportique brand.
Kimberley Walker 11:32
Yes, yes. I mean, a big part of my role is to consistently connect with our key partners to make sure that messaging and storytelling is continued to be transparent and aligned with who we are as a brand. I think that's a really good call out. I think I mean one of the biggest pieces is we do have very regular calls and catch ups in person with our brand partners. We there, you know, we have conversations to ensure that, particularly if there's any Co Op marketing as well, that everything aligns if there are some challenges, you know, there, there are ways that we kind of work through those conversations. We may not feature certain aspects, for example, of like, the verbiage of, you know, if there's a particular campaign, we may say, like, we still want to feature you, we still want to work together on this, but we may need to slightly adjust the language, for example, because it's not quite as digestible with our customer. We've had to do that for a couple of brands in the past, but it really is about thoughtful, open communication. We work with our brand partners for a long time. We go into these partnerships with a really long term perspective. So from the get go, we always want to ensure that, you know, we already are quite aligned on do we believe we're in sync with partnering with each other, if there are challenges down the road, yes, we make adjustments when it comes to how that's presented on site.
Andrew Maff 13:31
Yeah. Are you? Are there limitations within the partnership, like I know some companies, especially in some drop shipping models and things like that, you have the limitation of, you're not allowed to market against the brand. So you can't, you know, run ads on their name and things like that. And in most cases, the brand you're working with is not doing anything to promote the business that's helping sell the products. Is that a similar model with yours? Is it really just like you're just simply selling the product on your end. Or is there some type of, like, co marketing and limitations involved?
Kimberley Walker 14:07
Yeah, we have a couple of different models interwoven. So we have some brands where we, you know, it is a Standard Wholesale partnership where we buy inventory. For some brands, we do a drop ship model through our site, and then actually, for a few a number of brands, we manage their business on Sportique, as in, we purchase wholesale but we also launched those brands across a couple of marketplaces over the years, and we also purchase the inventory and do advertising for those brands on Amazon and Haus as well. Haus.com where, where it's category appropriate. So, so we partner is their third party seller on these platforms as Sportique, and we also range them on our website. And so it allows inventory and marketing to be very holistic, 360 approach. So we do have a few different models. And when it comes to marketing, it is, we have an excellent team who, you know, have to kind of tackle each one a little bit differently in terms of the drop ship set up specifically, I think that's what you were calling out. It's we. It's an opportunity for us to with that brand partner, see if that's a category fit or a product fit. It's a little bit of a test round. And from both ends, some brands are who are newer to the US. That's, you know, if they've just launched a warehouse here, and they're not quite sure yet where they fit, maybe the pricing needs to adjust. Maybe the position is to adjust. It is a good way for us to connect. And then we have a discussion, if we switch to wholesale, like purchasing, then we talk about if there's a way to do Co Op marketing, whether it's through our newsletter database or through our landing pages or social media, we'll connect with them on that.
Andrew Maff 16:34
Interesting and so then after that, is the next step, also evaluating if you're going to take them into other marketplaces or not?
Kimberley Walker 16:42
Yes, yeah. And it can be twofold. Sometimes we have brands who come to us with that request because we work with over 150 brands now. We have a number of brands come to us knowing that that's a service that we offer, and we have a whole team behind us, build out those that presence and another on the other side. Sometimes we see a lot of opportunity, and we say, well, you know, if we'd love to feature you on Sportique, see how that performs. And then if you want to expand to Amazon and or Haus. Let's have a chat about it, and particularly for international brands, it has been a really impactful way for them to build brand discovery and visibility.
Andrew Maff 17:33
That is very interesting. So you're using the drop shipping model as kind of a testing ground. If things work out well, you move into the wholesale model, and then, obviously, in certain scenarios, you jump them into marketplaces as well. Do you ever skip the Drop Shipping model and go straight into wholesaling? Or is it always that process is like, we're going to test you out on the drop shipping side?
Kimberley Walker 17:55
No, I mean, that's it. We do many brands straight to to a true like wholesale partnership, I would say dropship is actually quite a small portion of our setup now, because we have been running for for a long time, we we have a lot of data, and we know how, and we have a bit of a formula as to how we go about our curation, so we we have a better eye. So there's a number of brands that we go straight to a Standard Wholesale partnership and yeah, and then we explore further, if that's something where everyone sees is aligned and sees opportunity.
Andrew Maff 18:40
You had mentioned as well that it's about 50% international brands, 50% more local. The ones that are international. Are they kind of using you as like a platform to introduce the product line to the states? Or is it more like, No, we're just going to use you as a vehicle to sell in the States, and then that's it like, what are you kind of seeing to help those brands start to sell here?
Kimberley Walker 19:05
Yeah, I would say both. There are a number of brands where we have been one of the first US e comm channels. And, you know, really the go to location part of that, you know, those kind of conversations and really cultivating those relationships to get to that point is, you know, part of the reasoning we do trade shows, and we also have a really large network now that we, we have meetings with and connect with to really understand what those brands motivations are for the market. You know, so many of us have on the team. Have a huge level of experience in nurturing brands and brand management, and ultimately, we want to be one piece of the pie. And we really want to support their growth within the US, because it is such a huge step to come into this market. And it's, you know, to make an impact, you really have to invest as well and be willing to invest in marketing. So a number of brands, it is letting them know, like, this is what we stand for, this is who we are in the market. And if you're ready to take this jump, you know, we are a great platform to feature on. And again, like some brands might be in the stage of they've just landed distribution in the US, maybe they're not there yet. There are brands that we directly import who are not quite that step. And for those brands, we really are that opening presence. And so we want to make sure that that's impactful, and then build out some marketing around that.
Andrew Maff 20:56
Beautiful. Very interesting. It's an impressive model. You see a lot of people try it and often fail. And obviously Sportique has done an awesome job at getting it up into a position to really help international brands, as well as domestic brands, and really kind of position itself in this industry. Very cool. Kimberley, I really appreciate your time. I don't want to take up any more. I know you're super busy. I always kind of like to close it out, let everyone know where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more where they can find out more about Sportique.
Kimberley Walker 21:26
Yes, so head to our website, sportique.com and I'm on LinkedIn. Kimberley Walker, based in San Francisco, always love to meet up with other people who are passionate about brands and retail and E commerce, so that's where you'll find me.
Andrew Maff 21:44
Perfect. Kimberly, thank you so much for your time. Everyone who tuned in, of course, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time.
Narrator 22:06
Thank you for tuning in to theEcommshow. Head over to E comm show.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTusker YouTube channel. The E comm show is brought to you by BlueTusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show!