Sinéad Hammond: 0:00
Good afternoon. How are you, Imogen Crawford? 

Imogen Crawford: 0:07
Yes, hi, good afternoon.

Sinéad Hammond: 0:11
We’re all good, wonderful, okay. Well, just as we’re waiting for people to join in, welcome to episode seven of Shopperomics. I’m the first of 2024, which is incredibly exciting. So this episode is around retail marketing in a crisis and how brands can reposition themselves even when your entire industry is shutting down. So really excited to be doing this one, really looking forward to talking to Imogen Crawford. So today, joining me is Imogen Crawford, who is an e-commerce strategy consultant. Welcome, Imogen Crawford, it’s great to have you. Hi, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining. So you’ve had some pretty interesting roles across your career, including at Pukka Herbs, the School of Life, the Duppyshare and, as per the title of this talk, also at Trunkie. So I’d love for you to tell us a little bit more about yourself and about your career in e-commerce so far.

Imogen Crawford: 1:15
Yeah absolutely so. I’ll be honest, I kind of fell into e-commerce by accident. I started my first ever job was at the Duppyshare, which is a rum brand, and there were just the two founders and me for most of my time there. So it was, I’m sure you can imagine, an incredibly varied role. I had my fingers in all the pies and it was very much kind of get stuck in and get things done. So somehow by chance I ended up launching the brand on to Amazon and it was a brilliant timing actually, because Amazon were trying to grow their beer, wine and spirits category at the time, so they actually were giving us quite a lot of support to grow there. So that was a really interesting experience. And then I also was looking after accounts at Ocado but also not on the High Street and I was doing everything from listing the products to physically packing up the orders and taking them to the post office. So it was a bit of everything. And yeah, since then I’ve worked in quite a variety of businesses and I really like switching categories, even as the e-commerce kind of principles stay the same. When the product changes, the competitors change, the shopping behavior changes. It’s really interesting to see what happens to e-commerce dynamics. When you shift from, say, rum into a publishing brand or a travel brand, as I’ve done and yeah, so I’ve worked in quite a few different types of businesses I’ve actually had pretty terrible timing. So obviously we’re going to talk about working at Trunkey and selling suitcases during a pandemic, which, let me tell you, is a challenge. But actually, even most recently, I moved to Pukka on sort of November 2021 and took on global e-commerce at Pukka and it was a fantastic role and we still had an amazing kind of time there. But they had had a huge boom during COVID. So actually I kind of arrived just as things were starting to readjust back to normal. So I’ve not always had the best timing in my career, but I’ve actually learned a huge amount from that, and now I’m an e-commerce strategy consultant. So I left Pukka at the end of the year, starting in January. I am now supporting small and growing brands to bring clarity, bring confidence and bring creativity to their e-commerce business. So, yeah, it’s potterd history Very, very good.

Sinéad Hammond: 3:48
Yeah, it’s super varied. I mean I love that you have. I don’t love, but it’s so interesting that you’ve started all of your positions when it’s kind of almost the worst time to be joining in the sense of timing. But I feel the same in the sense that when you do join, when it’s not all going honky doory and it’s all going smoothly, you do find that you probably have the biggest learning curve. So I’m really looking forward to diving into some of those Before we do. Just a reminder for people who are just joining and I’m sure people will start coming and going throughout the hour this is a completely interactive event so it means that as a listener, you can get involved in the conversation. So you are able to ask to speak and we can welcome you to get involved in the chat. We’re all kind of it’s very chill here. So get involved, ask questions. We’ll have those at the end. So if you hear anything throughout the conversation and you decide that you want to ask something at the end, then make a note of that and we’ll be sure to answer those at the end. And if you’re not a fan of speaking and you just want to be listening in, there’s also a little comment section in the event itself where you can write down notes and anything and ask us questions in there. So lots of opportunities to get involved. And also, don’t forget to use the emojis throughout if you don’t even want to ask a question, but you just want to let Imogen Crawford know that you’re here or want to react to any of the things that are said. So now, with that, let’s get started with the conversation. So, Imogen Crawford, I’d love you to tell me a little bit about how you actually got into working at Trunkey.

Imogen Crawford: 5:27
Yeah, of course. So I talked a little bit about starting out at the Duffy Share and how varied a role that was, and from there I decided that Ecommerce was an area that I was interested in and I wanted to specialise a little bit more and get experience in some larger organisations to get much smaller than three of us. So I really wanted to get that variety of business as well. So I went to the School of Life, which is a fabulous kind of self-help brand. It’s all about helping people to lead more fulfilled lives and I started there as an Ecommerce manager and was looking after their website and Amazon sales of their books and stationery and homeware. They had a really lovely range of products. And then, while I was at the School of Life, I ended up becoming the head of marketing, and so that involved generalising again, which I do actually love. I’m a bit of a generalist at heart. So I was then looking after Ecommerce still, but also we were selling therapy and learning and development sessions and events and conferences. There’s a real range of things as well as that core kind of Ecommerce offering, and I absolutely loved my role there and it was really interesting and kind of unusual as a brand and a product offering. But I moved to Bristol. I wanted to be a bit more closer to the South West, so I moved to Bristol. I spent a year commuting and realised, actually, do you know what? I want to be a little bit more stationary. I don’t really want to be on the train twice a week up to London. So I was looking for a role in Bristol and pretty much the first role that came up was the Head of Ecommerce role at Truncay and it was just exactly the role I was looking for. It allowed me to specialise again. So I was focused specifically on e-commerce and it was a really interesting time for Truncay because the brand at that point had been going I can’t remember exactly how long, but somewhere 13, 14 years, something around there and they really had built their business on bricks and mortar retail and actually what they were just looking to do was pivot more towards e-commerce. So they had an e-commerce business on Amazon and Shopify stores in Europe and the US, but they were really wanting to amplify that e-commerce business and grow, especially in Europe and the US. So it was a really exciting moment for them. I joined. That was August 2019. And my role was very much to help them to craft that strategy to pivot towards e-commerce and grow. That was where they certainly saw the future growth of the business.

Sinéad Hammond: 8:17
Amazing. It’s just so interesting that you’ve had so many different parts across the e-commerce realm, as it were, because I think this, hopefully, was really helpful when you went into the brand you’ve moved into, because I think lots of people they do specialise from the start and grow outwards, where it seems like you’ve done it on a slightly opposite way. You’ve started in a more generic kind of like, doing lots of different verticals, working in such a small brand with only the three of you, and then kind of ended up being a bit more niche and specialising again. So it’s a really interesting journey, very, very cool. So when you eventually moved into Trunkey, this was, as we mentioned, just a couple of months before the whole world of travel shut down, which is incredible. So how did that impact?

Imogen Crawford: 9:10
Well, the thing to know about Trunkey is so, for anyone who’s not already familiar, trunkey is a ride-on suitcase for children and it was found. It was actually initially put onto Dragonsten and rejected and since it did incredibly well, led by the founder, rob, and while in the years since that initial kind of founding of Trunkey, we had established a broader range, so there were kids’ backpacks and toddler rains, lunchboxes, water bottles, those kinds of things. It was kind of kids’ accessories. But even at the point of February 2020, this suitcase made up 80% of the business’s sales. Wow. And as well as that, 80% of the sales were of all the products were happening in retail stores. So E-commerce was still quite a small part of the business, and this product that was specifically designed not just for kids’ travel but really for airports Like, it doesn’t really work so well in a car because it’s actually quite an awkward shape and it’s not particularly space efficient. What’s really magical about the Trunkey is that it’s on wheels and it allows your toddler to wheel around the airport and have a great time and keep themselves occupied. So actually, as soon as people are not able to travel by plane, the Trunkey becomes a lot less relevant, and that was 80% of our sales. So over the course of about a week we pretty much saw 80% of our sales plummet and yeah, it was interesting because we kind of had it was building. It didn’t happen all at once. We knew something was coming, we knew that there would be issues with travel, but I think we didn’t quite see the extent of it. I didn’t think many people saw what would happen in terms of lockdowns. So we had to think very quickly and we had to go into protection mode. So we had to make sure that we could keep the business going. We didn’t know how long we had to keep it going for and we didn’t really know what was going to happen next. So we had to go into kind of super cautious mode. But I’m sure you can imagine that, given the makeup of the business and where we were at, the only channel that was open to us as a sales channel was e-commerce, and that was still only 20% and our core product was suddenly not so relevant. So it was quite a big impact.

Sinéad Hammond: 11:41
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean it’s the complete opposite for, say, other agencies, other industries and sectors that saw this kind of normal boost. You were kind of thinking well, our entire you know the channels that we have have completely closed down. So really abnormal situation to be in, because obviously the pandemic in itself was completely abnormal, but then to be to have your whole market rely, your whole brand, rely on the market being open Just a very strange situation to find yourself into. So what was the initial reaction to this as a company? Because I can imagine that I would be running around panicking.

Imogen Crawford: 12:20
Yeah, you know what, thinking back, it’s actually remarkable how little panic there was in the business. I am sure that Rob, the founder, especially, would have been panicking inside, but he did a great job of not showing that. But I think what we did was we were super cautious, so we went. We pretty much switched every single thing that we were spending money on off if we could. So we made use of the furlough scheme, which really did, you know, save the business in many ways. So my team went on furlough and I stayed around to basically, suddenly, I was doing the jobs of everyone in my team, which was an interesting experience in its own right. But we had to see we had a lot of two thirds of the business went on furlough, all of our marketing spenders switched off and even things like we had a website reskin in the works and we had to hit the pause button. And actually our agency partners were incredible. They were so understanding, they, you know they while they also knew that we were in quite a unique situation, as you say, like other e-commerce brands, certainly ones who had a product that was really suitable for being at home were suddenly seeing an amazing boom, whereas obviously, given the sector we were in, we were not experiencing that. So pretty much everything was switched off. Then, obviously, after the initial shock and the first couple of weeks, we realized that we this was gonna last a fair amount of time. We needed to make sure that we, you know, stayed relevant, that we still maintained whatever business we could. And so we had a look at, firstly, we went into kind of hyper granular mode. So suddenly our reporting was, you know, day by day, where it’s previously been maybe week to week, and we changed I mean, we changed so many things about the way we work internally. But also we looked at our product range. So you know, where are the parts of the range where actually we can still be relevant, things like kids’ backpacks still relevant, things like actually we had a range of toddler reigns which so, if you can imagine, things to keep your toddler from running away. They’re really cute, little kind of animal designs and things, and they’d been kind of trucking along. They weren’t a super seller but they were, you know, pretty good product. Suddenly it became apparent that they were excellent for helping toddlers to social distance. So actually they really exploded and so we started to pivot all of our efforts towards that product and that was across the whole business, because suddenly you know we needed to look at how we were getting enough stock in. But also you know how we were showing the product, how we were marketing it, how we were kind of keeping our audience engaged with us with the product that was super relevant and being as agile, I guess, as possible.

Sinéad Hammond: 15:13
Absolutely so. How did you kind of decide you know how to reposition that. What kind of process did you go through to to, just you know, select that new product and act on that reactively that fast?

Imogen Crawford: 15:27
Yeah, it’s interesting, I think it’s. We talk a lot in e-commerce about data, and data is super important. I will tell any client that I work with and any business I’ve worked in, that you’ve got to get your data in order before you you can do anything, because you need to know. You know the impact of what you’re doing, but you also need to be able to work without data. You need to be able to kind of go sort of go with your gut, go with your common sense and also listen to your customers, even if it’s only a handful of them that you can talk to. So, a little bit, we got in touch with our little customer base and we talked to them and we said you know what is life like for you, you know what’s going on, what are your challenges. But also, actually the company was made up to a large extent of parents, so they also really understood what parents were going through in the pandemic. You know we had a really solid understanding of our customers. So to an extent, we used data and we did. You know we used tools like Helium 10, for example, for Amazon to do market research and that kind of thing. But I’ll be honest that actually a lot of it came down to just really tuning into what is. What are the challenges that parents are facing and how can we help make this time just a little bit easier with something that’s gonna, you know, maybe help them keep their toddler from hugging all of the other toddlers in park or something.

Sinéad Hammond: 16:54
Yeah, which is you would never imagine that to have been a problem if you spoke about it in 2019, but suddenly keeping your child away from another child is actually a good thing. So it’s great that you had that product available and it’s so interesting that before the pandemic it was kind of a small seller and then afterwards became one of your biggest reliable products just so interesting. Did you find that happened with any of your other products in the products that you had within Trunkey?

Imogen Crawford: 17:23
So, in terms of the products we had going in, there was a little bit. We saw a little bit of success, but mainly actually we were. Then, after it became clear that this was gonna be lasting a longer than a couple of months and we knew that things were gonna be changing, you know, at least for a year or so, we then started to look at new product development. So Rob, who’s the founder designer of Trunki he’s really a product designer at heart and he immediately turned to okay, is there a market for kids face masks? It was really interesting because in the UK there absolutely wasn’t, because the guidance wasn’t to put face masks on kids. And actually, although we knew there wasn’t a big market, we did make the face masks available in the UK and we actually got some quite a strong backlash actually from people saying oh, you know, you shouldn’t be putting kids in face masks. Meanwhile, in France and Germany, kids were wearing face masks at school and that was a requirement at school was to wear a face mask, and so it’s really interesting to see actually across different markets, how different the experience could be. So we did launch some face masks and there was some really interesting innovation there, because actually I was thinking about well, how do you make a face mask that’s really comfortable for a child? You know they had really kind of fun colors and faces on, like animal faces on them and that kind of thing to really speak to what they would feel more comfortable doing, knowing that it would be quite an uncomfortable thing. And we also, just before the pandemic, we had launched some folding scooters and bikes with Halford’s. So imagine like a Brompton bike, you know, the ones that fold up and you can carry around, but in kind of scooter or bike form for kids. And that was actually you know, way before lockdown but obviously suddenly became really important when actually people were only able to go out, you know, within their neighborhood, and go to the park. That was an area that we could really lean into. So we knew that that was an area that was worth kind of pushing a little bit more than perhaps we might have done had everything been normal. And that informed the product development that Rob had done on the scooters and the bikes then informed a bit more product development, which was how do you design a trunki? That’s not just for the airport, because the trunki wheels anyone who’s listening, who has got a trunki or has been through an airport with a child on a trunki, they’ll know that it works really well on those kind of super smooth airport floors, but as soon as you take it on the pavement to the park it doesn’t really work. So since then actually trunkis launched I think it’s called a rodeo kind of product which has got much more durable wheels and wheels that are designed for off-roading, I guess. So actually that’s launched after the pandemic, but I think it has done pretty well so far. I’m not. Obviously there’s no more, so I don’t really know. But yeah, it’s interesting how they always say necessity is the mother of invention and COVID really did prove that for a trunki.

Sinéad Hammond: 20:33
Absolutely, and it’s the product innovation that’s so cool because it’s completely, 100% informed by market. Often brands do fall into the pitfall of creating things that aren’t really necessarily needed for the people that they’re serving, or it goes out and maybe it isn’t right for the correct market, like you’re saying there with France and Germany, but it looks really, it sounds really cool that all these product developments actually came out of the inability to sell the main product. And I love the idea of that. I have seen, obviously, trunkis, have seen them around the airport and I always wish I had I was that age and able to go around and want myself. But I love the idea of rodeo, off-roading trunkis and being able to take into the parts because people’s behavior has changed and I mean that is going to last out a lot longer because people are doing similar. They’ve gone back to the airport, they are still doing more traveling, staycations, that sort of thing Absolutely so that is a product that’s gonna continue to last way beyond the original necessity that it was created for. In the pandemic and in terms of your if other things that are accelerated. I know you’d said to us that the physical stores were closed. Did that have an impact on the way that you kind of went into sales? Was that where, just because most businesses did go into more e-commerce side? Is that something that happened with you guys as well?

Imogen Crawford: 22:01
Yeah, it is, and I think it’s worth saying. I’ve been talking a little bit about the new product development we did, but we didn’t give up on the trunki itself and we knew that that would one day still be our core product. So the trunki was still where we were. We were still wanting to kind of build that distribution online, which obviously had been the strategy before the pandemic hit. So in some ways it did just accelerate that strategy. So actually, while we were suddenly more reliant on e-commerce, it did speed up that push towards e-commerce. And during COVID I think it was in 2021, that I launched the brand on Zolando, which is the fashion marketplace, and on Seediscount, which is a kind of French answer to Amazon. In some ways, obviously I have Amazon there too, but yes, we launched the brand on Seediscount and Zolando. So that was quite exciting actually to be doing new things, even while the business is not necessarily thriving. But we were still moving forwards and we were still thinking about the future. We knew that, although our bricks and mortar retail would reopen, we were already on the path to pivot towards e-commerce and I think you can see now there’s lots of brands that have struggled since the end of the pandemic because they saw this huge boom on e-com and then people went back to shopping in person a little bit and I think a lot of businesses have slightly panicked that oh my God, e-commerce is over. It was just about COVID. The reality is that the trajectory, the growth trajectory of e-commerce is, if you take out the kind of COVID blip, if you go from 2019 to today and go back before 2019 as well, there’s actually quite a smooth trajectory of growth for e-commerce and in some ways we had this kind of really unusual obviously I hate the word because we’ve all used it so much but an unprecedented bump in e-commerce usage during COVID and it’s obviously fallen since then because people can go and shop in person and consumers still want to do that. But the long-term trend is still towards more and more e-commerce sales. So what was really good at Truncay was that we didn’t throw out our entire strategy. We didn’t panic. Yes, we looked at new products. Yes, we launched new marketplaces, but we also knew that the core business model was still relevant in the long term.

Sinéad Hammond: 24:31
Yeah, it proves the durability, I think, and robustness of a product and a strategy when you’re able to know that it’s going to outlast something as unpredictable as 2020. And I like the fact that it’s kind of stayed core to the product, whilst you’ve also been able to reposition and diversify the markets in this.

Imogen Crawford: 24:52
I think it’s all about knowing who you are as a brand. So we knew who Trunci was, who it was for, we knew our customer inside out, which meant that we could experiment with new products without kind of getting distracted, and I think that really, really helped through that crisis mode.

Sinéad Hammond: 25:10
Definitely. It’s such a good example of it as well and it gives a really good kind of foundation for other brands listening, or the brands listening on the recording later of how to deal with this, because I mean, hopefully there’s no pandemic again, but there’s all sorts of external market crisis that can change the trajectory of your brand and the way that you need to position it. So it’s really cool listening to your story and your insights and maybe thinking about how that can be applied to other brands and the way other people deal with these crises in the future. Just as a quick reminder to people listening, we do take questions at the end, so I know Imogen Crawford has blasted through some incredible stuff already, but if you do have any questions or you want to know more about something that Imogen Crawford has mentioned, don’t forget that we do stay to the end and you can ask questions or you can put some comments in the link in event there as well. So, just going back to some of your past experiences that you’d worked in, how do you think this sort of helped influence the kind of the situation that you had in Trunki and then how do you think that maybe influenced your recent role at Pocker Herbs, and then all the way up to your running your own consultancy now, yeah, of course I think my experience in a startup was completely I mean, it was foundational because it was my first role, but it really did set the tone for so much of my way of working in future roles, especially at Trunki.

Imogen Crawford: 26:45
Because the reality is anyone who’s worked in a startup will know that it kind of is like being in crisis. So you’re in a situation where every single penny matters. You don’t have data, or you might have some data but you don’t have lots of data. You often don’t have lots of kind of tech to support you. Everything has to be a little bit more rough and ready and you have to be willing to test things constantly and build your own data and to try and figure out your next move. So that experience that I had at the Duppyshare and to an extent at the School of Life as well and it wasn’t quite the same startup phase, but it was definitely a small business that was growing rapidly you know there’s a certain level of granularity that you need when you’re in that kind of when cash flow is super important and when you don’t necessarily have a kind of established playbook to just execute. You’ve got to be figuring out your next move constantly. So that was a really, really valid experience in that sense and I think it also it really helped me personally with a stakeholder management, which also becomes really important during a crisis. I think the thing about a crisis is often it doesn’t change the fundamentals. What it does is it amplifies everything, so your risks feel bigger, your wins feel bigger, you know, everything kind of feels super sensitive, and so part of that is also, you know, at Trunkey I was working very closely with the business leaders so that was the founder of Rob and you know, our kind of sales marketing director, finance director and chairman, and I was working with them to. You know, they were steering the ship, they were getting Trunkey through the storm and I was, you know, trying to make sure that they had all the information they needed. They were, you know, needing to make decisions really quickly on not very much evidence. So it was a really kind of careful bit of stakeholder management that I had to do and, you know, I think we had a good relationship before we went into crisis, which is really important. But you know also my experience in tiny businesses, where those relationships again matter so much more, I think, than a big business. I think that was really valuable. So, yeah, that was start-up life, crisis life. There’s not that much between them. 

Then, you know, when I then moved on to Pukka, Pukka was like nowhere I’d ever worked before because I’d worked in, you know, these three businesses that were all very different and different sizes, but, generally speaking, very small and entrepreneurial, rapidly growing, and moved to Pukka, which has also, you know, grown hugely during COVID, but it was, you know, at the time it was owned by Unilever. It’s not anymore but it’s still part of a bigger corporation and it’s, you know, quite a corporate structure and it’s quite a different way of working to get things done. But what’s amazing at Pukka is they have that, that entrepreneurial drive to move quickly. But you do need to be able to kind of work within the bigger structures and there’s a lot less appetite for risk, that’s for sure. And when I was in smaller businesses, I think what was really magic about working at Pukka, you know, and any experience in a bigger business is suddenly you do have resources, so you can, you know, really test things out with big reach, you can get a lot of data, you can test out some really fun things and I think if you can bring that kind of entrepreneurial spirit to a bigger business. Where you’ve got those resources, it can be a really fun and exciting thing. So, yeah, I think that really helped me to push things forward at Pukka, having that experience in those smaller businesses and having also, you know, a big business. You’ve got often like a matrix structure so departments can be quite siloed, but given my kind of generalist background, I was able to talk to the supply chain team on their terms and understand, you know, what they were talking about, because I had had quite a lot of exposure to other departments in smaller businesses. So that had been a really valuable experience. And, yeah, that’s something that I now, you know, bring to my work consulting. You know Ecommerce strategy is not just about running advertising and it’s not just about supply chain. It’s about the whole picture. How are you getting to market? How are you getting in front of your customers? What’s your brand identity? You know it’s such a varied. I always used to joke no one ever knows where to put the e-commerce department Like does it sit in marketing? Does it sit in sales? Is it supply chain? No one ever knows where it sits. If it’s not, you know, if the business isn’t 100% e-commerce. So what I found is that that is because it all has to be pulling together, it all has to be working. You know, everyone has to be kind of rowing in the same direction, otherwise you’re going to have a lot of problems. 

Okay, now that I’m running A consultancy, I’m really keen, always with clients, to make sure that we’re looking at the big picture and we’re not just saying, okay, here’s how you’re going to spend lots of money on ads but neglecting the fact that your supply chain is not in the right place or that you haven’t got a relevant product for your target audience. You’ve got to make sure all of those things can work together.

Sinéad Hammond: 32:10
Yeah, definitely, and I feel like, across the amount of experience that you’ve had, you’re working within restrictions and then working with a lot less in terms of, I guess, the big businesses that you’re kind of having to adapt particularly now you’re in your consultancy to lots of different variations of what a business can do with their e-commerce strategy. Right, because there’s tons of different ways you can do it, whether it’s counting every single penny or being given a huge budget to be able to be as creative as possible. So it’s really cool that you’ve had all of those, across all your different experiences, to be able to then apply to lots of different brands and I think people listening as well with any brand that you’re running yourselves or with any brand that you’re involved in. It means that some of these ideas can then be applied regardless of what size you’re in and what sort of budgets you’ve got and what sort of goals and vision you’ve got. So it’s really this kind of works across lots of different brands which is really cool. We love a good success story and you’ve talked loads about some really cool work you’ve been able to do and some great successes and how you’ve managed to pivot and reposition and all of those things which are really cool, but were there any pitfalls or was there anything that maybe you would do differently in a similar crisis situation, like if there was any sort of drastic market change in the future? Is there anything that you think actually we could have done that in a slightly different way?

Imogen Crawford: 33:37
Yeah, it’s a really good point, I think that. So at Pukka I really learned a lot about the concept of the laws of growth and how brands grow, which is a kind of marketing theory that I hadn’t really come across before because, to be honest, you don’t hear much about that kind of thing in startups and small businesses, but when you get into that larger kind of corporate world, there’s a lot more of that kind of marketing theory available. So I’ve really had a learning journey at Pukka about what makes brands grow, and we know that one of the most important things in the laws of growth is salience, which means being kind of just being there, showing up, being top of mind, so that when a consumer does want to make a decision about what they’re going to purchase, they’re going to think of you because they’ve seen you around and they remember that you exist. So I think one of the things now with that knowledge, looking back at what we did at Trunki, I think it was a shame that we had to switch everything off in terms of our marketing activity. I know why we did it we were in cash flow kind of protection mode and we didn’t have budget to spend on awareness, for example, but one of the biggest drivers of salience for Trunki was families seeing other families at the airport with a Trunki and thinking, oh, I wish I had one of those right now. It was an amazing marketing for us just for families to be able to see how other families were doing it and thinking, oh, I need to get one of those because I’m having a tough day and it would be really helpful if I could keep my toddler occupied with a ride on suitcase. So actually to take that away because people weren’t seeing each other in airports, and then also to switch off the majority of our marketing activity. Certainly, at the beginning we did gradually kind of switch things back on. I think we probably made our lives harder when it came to the recovery because we’d been offline for too long and we didn’t have budget to spend, but we did have supportive investors and we were still able to invest in the brand when we could. So, for example, we would be looking at the news. I’m sure everyone can remember those days when there would be an announcement about whether or not you could go on holiday and which countries you could go to and when you could go. Well, we were watching that news like hawks thinking okay, people are going to be able to fly to Spain Quick, let’s get some ads running we were switching things back on as soon as we could, so there was space to invest and I think that if we’d been able to maintain media was cheap at that point, because so many brands pulled their media spend, certainly during the first lockdown so I think there probably was an opportunity for us to actually retain some awareness, even though the product at that particular moment wasn’t super relevant. So that’s definitely something that I’ve learned, actually, since being at Pukka. Now I look back at that time at Chonky, I possibly would have handed it differently but, like I say, the budget was a key constraint there, so it might not have been possible, even if we would have wanted to do it.

Sinéad Hammond: 36:55
Yeah, the budget, and also being completely reliant on whether or not the government were going to open gates and whether they were going to close them down, whether we were going to be a rule of six, a rule of one, a household group or some bubbles that it was so many things to consider. And it sounds like you definitely tapped into the reactive side of marketing, which can be so much fun and so creative Even now. I guess this is not the same as that situation, but when certain trends and things are going on online or you see something inspired by a pop culture and you’re able to be that little bit more creative and jump onto something and be a bit reactive with your marketing, I think that’s such a skill that, particularly if things go swimmingly well, most of the time You’re not necessarily having to flex that much. And so it does sound to me that you really got to have a bit of fun with that, despite some of the risks, I guess, and maybe some of the kind of concerns as to whether or not this was going to be long term. It does sound like it was a. I can imagine what your marketing team meetings would have been like over those few years when it was just like right now. What.

Imogen Crawford: 38:12
It’s funny also because, looking back at it, there’s two other constraints that I haven’t. I don’t often think about, but one of them was that my entire team was on furlough, so if I was going to do anything, it was much on me to do. So that was, and actually when the team did come back, they were chomping in the bit. Obviously they really wanted to be working and doing their jobs, but we had to be cautious. But the other thing is that it was super political. So even if you could go on holiday, there were people who believed that you shouldn’t, and so we also had that really tough thing to navigate, which is how do you position yourselves when you know that if you start saying to everyone, quick, go on holiday, there are going to be people who don’t think that that’s appropriate, and you don’t necessarily want to alienate people, but it’s also risky for a brand to be so cautious that you don’t say anything. So it was a real minefield to navigate.

Sinéad Hammond: 39:08
Interesting. Yeah, it does sound like a big challenge. In all of those different things, I completely forgot about the political stance of things as well. Yeah, there’s so many macro impacts there that you’ve got so amazing for keeping it going. It’s really exciting stuff. So what has all of this taught you about e-commerce when markets are volatile? I mean we’ve discussed it a little bit, but anything that you would kind of summarize, share that you’d learned that you would be like this is what you should do. This is what we’d advise going forward.

Imogen Crawford: 39:40
So number one is just stay calm. You know, don’t panic, take a beat to just let whatever’s happened sink in. I see so much reactivity, even not with a volatile market necessarily, but even just a one bad sales day, a team might completely jump on. You know, re-do their whole advertising strategy. And the reality is that you’re just you’re going to become a busy fool in some ways because you’ve got to actually trust the process a little bit. So I’d say, you know, stay calm, no sudden moves. You don’t need to rewrite your whole strategy just because something has changed, but what you do need to do is stay completely focused on your consumer. What is it that they want? What is it that they need? How can you best serve them? What are their motivations? And there’s so many ways you can do that. I mean you can go into, you know you can at the kind of top line level you can be polling your consumer. You can do big studies. But also you can literally just send an email out to your newsletter, your like mailing list, and ask, just ask your consumers, like what you know, what’s going on for you, what do you, what are you thinking? And I think often we kind of underestimate the power that we have of just to talk to even just a few of our own consumers just to find out, like, what is what’s on their mind and how can we really help them. So I think also there’s a tendency and I see this, I’ve seen this more in bigger businesses but there is a tendency to get kind of caught up in your own head or or think too much about what’s happening internally and really it’s all about what the consumer wants and are you able to deliver that to them. Because if you are, then you’re going to be okay. And then the third thing so stay calm, stay focused on the consumer. And the third thing would be test everything. So that’s the magic of e-commerce. We’ve got access to huge amounts of data and you can be incredibly agile, you can really get your quick feedback via e-commerce. So I would say constantly test. But a word of warning I see so often people say, oh, we’re just going to do this as a test, and what they actually mean is we don’t fully believe in what we’re doing. We’re just going to call it a test, almost like a hedge, like, oh, I’m, you know, just, we’re just going to see it’s a test. If you’re running a test, you need to know what are you actually testing, what are you looking for, what is it that you’re going to, how are you going to know if your test is successful and what are you going to do with that information? So, yes, you can test everything, you can get data and feedback really, really quickly, but you need to know what you’re looking for. Otherwise, you’re just going to have a whole load of data that you don’t know what to do with.

Sinéad Hammond: 42:29
Absolutely so, so important that we see that all the time where we’re testing and trying experiments and doing, you know bits and pieces and think, okay, well, what was the goal here? What did we actually want to find out? You know what would be the actual kind of overall outcome we wanted to try and understand here. So really valuable, really, really glad you raised that point because it is just so key and so overlooked, especially when you know, like you were saying before, people are, you know, chopping and changing very, very quickly. They haven’t thought about exactly why they’re you know they’re failing and maybe they go straight to rewrite their whole strategy and just throw more stuff out there. So I think that’s a really incredibly valuable advice there. And final reminder to the audience as well we do take questions, so I’ve got one more for Imogen Crawford and then we’ll open it up to anybody who wants to ask anything, to get thinking about what you might want to ask. So, Imogen Crawford, what are your plans now, after, I’d say, five, six years of all these different brands and all the different experience gathered? What are you up to?

Imogen Crawford: 43:37
Yeah, thanks for asking. So I, as of January the first, I ventured out on my own as an e-commerce consultant. So it’s been, do you know what? It’s been a whirlwind so far. But what I’m doing? I’m offering an e-commerce consultancy for small and growing brands. So so far most of my clients have been in the food and drink space. So I’ve been drawing a lot on my experience at the Duffy Share and at Pukka. But I’m not kind of, you know, confined just to the food and drink. I do love it. The samples are always handy Food and drink. I’m a real foodie, so I absolutely love getting things in the post. You know, my first client was a lovely British honey brand, and so I’ve been working my way through some lovely autumn honey which has been doing wonders for my porridge in the mornings.

Sinéad Hammond: 44:28
Wow.

Imogen Crawford: 44:29
It’s a new perk of working with food and drink, but that’s not to say that I would look at other categories. Obviously, as I said before, I love working across lots of different industries, but what I’m really, my approach, is all about helping businesses to bring more clarity to what they’re doing online, so making sense of that huge volume of data that’s available and really being clear about their strategy and what their consumers want some of those things I was talked about. Also about bringing confidence. So I see e-commerce often being kind of considered as exciting and, you know, potential for huge growth, but also risky and people are nervous to invest in e-commerce because it’s a feeling of you know I could spend a lot of money and not see the return. So what I do is about helping kind of empower businesses with the understanding of where are the risks and where are the areas where you can kind of really drive profitability, where you can really drive growth and kind of build your brand, and then also a little bit of creativity, because that’s what makes the job fun, right? So it’s all about you know, that’s about being creative with your content, but also with your approach. Yes, Dave, things like certainly working with Amazon, you can’t necessarily go against. The Amazon have quite strict rules and ways of working with them and you have to work with that. But you also you can bend the rules a little bit and you need to know how to do that to make it really work for you so that you kind of make the most of your e-commerce channels. So yeah, clarity, confidence and creativity, those are my three C’s and my kind of approach when I’m helping brands develop that e-commerce strategy.

Sinéad Hammond: 46:13
Excellent. Thank you so much. That was so cool. I definitely feel the B brands that would be very, very keen to sort of work with you, given the amount of experience, the amount of kind of resilience you’ve been able to show throughout all the different brands you’ve been working with. So thank you so so much for taking the time to chat with us today. We do open the floor up to people asking questions, so I don’t know if anyone on the call at the moment has any questions that they’d like to ask Imogen Crawford whilst she’s still here.

Imogen Crawford: 46:50
Don’t be shy, I don’t bite.

Sinéad Hammond: 46:54
So I have. Actually. I did actually have a question come in from someone who was here before but had to leave for something else. So I wondered well, they wondered during the pandemic and afterwards how important was price? So did you have to heavily apply discounts, for example, or did you not have to rely on that?

Imogen Crawford: 47:14
That’s a really interesting question actually. So pricing I always say it’s not about the price, it’s about how you frame the price. So there are ways to show people why it’s worth paying more for a product, and actually sometimes a high price product can convey quality and kind of premiumness, rather than something that’s always an offer that’s gonna kind of devalue the product in a way. So pricing was something that was really important at Trunkey and actually it was really challenging, because another kind of element that we for kind of I sort of forget often is that during COVID we also had Brexit coming into play and that caused absolute havoc for our supply chain. We also had a whole challenge with getting so. Trunkis were all made in the UK but the rest of our product range was produced in China and I don’t know if anyone else will remember, but there was a massive shortage of shipping containers in China to get stock over to Europe. So we did have to put our prices up because we were struggling with those increased costs. Also, advertising became more expensive and we generally found that we didn’t have a huge amount of challenge to putting our prices up because we hadn’t done it for a long time. So it was kind of long overdue. I don’t know now in the last kind of year or so, when lots of brands have been putting up their prices. I don’t know exactly what Trunki’s been doing in that sense, but I think during the pandemic we didn’t go specifically to discounting unless it was about us sitting on lots of stocks. So where there were certain lines that we had loads of stock and we wanted to get through it, then we would. But we wanted to position ourselves as a premium brand that was high quality, that was worth paying more for. So we did stick to our guns in a way in that sense over the kind of crisis period. I don’t know if that answers the question. Hopefully that helps give a bit of colour on the pricing.

Sinéad Hammond: 49:18
Yeah, definitely. Thank you very much for answering that one and thanks for the question. I’ll put it on the recording as well so that people can catch up later and listen to it. It’s exciting. Are there any more questions for Imogen before we close out?

Imogen Crawford: 49:34
Going once, going twice.

Sinéad Hammond: 49:37
Okay, I’m going to say that as a no, which means Imogen Crawford. You must have covered everything and you’ve inspired us all, and everyone’s scribbling down tons and tons of notes. So thank you so much. It’s honestly been such a pleasure. This has been one of my favourite episodes. I really, really love talking to you. I love your insight, I love your experience, I love your attitude to e-commerce and I’m sure anyone who gets to work with you in the future will also agree having the pleasure of working with you. So thank you again. So so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Imogen Crawford: 50:07
It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been fun reliving wild time. I can’t believe it was four years ago now.

Sinéad Hammond: 50:15
Yeah, I know it’s a bizarre. Time has gone very strangely slow or fast, I don’t really know. It’s all a bit out of whack since . Yeah, it’s all very strange, but it’s been really really great diving into the experiences you had. Just as a thank you to everybody who tuned in, whether you tuned in at the beginning, whether you tuned in at the end, or whether you’re listening on the recording, we will have the transcript and audio to be able to listen to in the coming days at shoppernomics.co.uk, so look out for that and we’ll make sure we put it on the links in page. You can also subscribe to Shoponomics, our ecommerce podcast on the webpage as well to get the latest updates in your inbox. And finally, a reminder of the next shoponomics event, which will be on the 21st of February with Alberto Bilato, who actually was on this listening in before, which is really cool, so looking forward to being able to chat with him in a couple of weeks’ time. Once again, yeah, honestly, I’m just going to thank you so much for talking to us and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their day.

Imogen Crawford: 51:20
Thanks so much, Great to talk to you. Bye.